The curious case of ‘Please Rob Me’

February 19, 2010

HospitallerFortress-l

Doubtless PleaseRobMe would contend that its service is creative, not curious. It might further add, to those who say that its name ought to deploy the verb “burgle” rather than “rob”, that language is Protean, not Procrustean. But we, who ply our trade in PR, are happy to dip, if only occasionally, into the hinterland of linguistic ambivalence, accepting that to do so can be both curious and creative.

American service PleaseRobMe have piqued our and Legal Blog Watch’s interest, not to mention that of Gawker and TechCrunch. So should we celebrate or decry PleaseRobMe, which reposts Tweets in which people say exciting things like “Hi, I’ve just left the house” or “Here in the supermarket the fish is fresh” or “Guess what, my house is empty! LOL!”?

Presumably, if it were able, PleaseRobMe would also republish the content of blogs whose writers announce their whereabouts, so long, that is, that their location is not ‘at home’.

Be that as it may, PleaseRobMe’s mission is not to change its name to one which lawyers and grammarians would find acceptable – i.e, PleaseBurgleMe – but to continue in its crusade to alert people to the downsides of publicising the fact that one is not presently at one’s place of residence.

We cannot but put PleaseRobMe’s mission into our curiously creative, or creatively curious, file. On the one hand, PleaseRobMe’s arrival is an object lesson in how to unleash a website and garner oodles of PR; on the other, PleaseRobMe happily participates in the further erosion of the notion of privacy and, a creative lawyer might argue, aids and abets in all but actus reus the burglar’s brief.

If that sounds a little Procrustean, it shouldn’t. We’re just curious. And, as we write, we are also at home.

Pictured: Swordplay Towers. There is always someone in. Even if we tweet to say that it’s Friday, we’ve had a long week, we fancy a cooling sip of London’s finest lager and after all, doesn’t everyone deserve a break every now and then?, so yes, you’re right, let’s go for a swiftie, we’re down the pub and might not be back for a while but please don’t burgle us while we’re gone, or rob us on the way home or, if we’re lucky enough to meet you and get along well, do anything Procrustean if we’re lucky enough to be invited back for a coffee. [That's way too many characters for Twitter. Stick to a bit of Protean text-speak next time. Ed.].

 

One Response to “The curious case of ‘Please Rob Me’”

Posted by:
Penelope Swift on February 19, 2010 at 12:49 pm

Doubtless Blade would contend that he has occassion to deply a creative attitude to spelling in this post, though I am curious.

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Good work by Rusbridger

February 10, 2012
scissors

The headline says it all: ‘Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger takes pay cut‘.

Dan Sabbagh’s piece says a bit more: said editor ‘emailed staff at the newspaper to say that his salary in the upcoming 2012-13 financial year will be £395,010, compared with £438,900 in the current financial year’.

Some voices say: ‘How worthy.’

Others opine: ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’

But we say: good work by Mr Rusbridger. For the sake of the media’s survival, we hope that others in senior positions in the industry will follow suit.

Image of toolkit allegedly deployed by Alan Rusbridger courtesy of Flickr user LollyKnit.

From the inside of the maze, ethically outwards

February 9, 2012

Curious times in the media; strange days at The Times.

Would ‘Dacre Cards‘ – the system of licensing journalists proposed by Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre – have prevented the embarrassment now palpable at the Times over the NightJack story?

Times editor James Harding’s evidence to the Leveson Inquiry seemed heartfelt and contrite, albeit that the paper’s former long-serving and much-respected lawyer, Alastair Brett, seems to have been, er, rather dropped in it. Clearly, mistakes were made with regard to NightJack by young reporter Patrick Foster who, once he had hacked into NightJack’s account and thus discovered his identity, then embarked on a quest to expose it via legitimate methods. This, as Inquiry counsel Robert Jay QC put it, was “rather like working from the inside of the maze out”.

But had Foster been licensed via a Dacre Card, would this unsavoury episode in the Times’s history have been avoided?

We suspect not. A raft of laws were in existence at precisely the time when many News of the World journalists seemed to believe that they were entitled to hack any phone they liked. Those laws forbade them from doing so, and yet made no difference. Aside from the obvious objection to them – that they will squeeze out freelancers and citizen journalists – Dacre Cards would simply amount to something to circumvent.

What is really required is an ethical shake-up, from top to bottom. Society generally – not just journalists – needs a sense that some things are just plain wrong.

Supreme Court on Twitter

February 6, 2012

Something remarkable happened today. Yes, the Supreme Court launched its Twitter feed. It even has a Twitter policy, one of caveats, disclaimers and little by way of illumination but regardless: who would have thought that the successor body to the House of Lords would stoop to engage with the world of tweets, hashtags and retweets?

We look forward to the day when court business will be conducted via Twitter. Meantime, check out this link for an excellent blog on the Supreme Court.