Privacy/Confidentiality

Privacy

The UK has no written constitutions but the nearest thing to one is the Human Rights Act passed in 1998. Section 8 of the Human Rights act states that everyone has a right to privacy and the right to enjoy a private family life. This means that when a journalist reports on an individual, there are certain hurdles they face.

A person needs to give consent to have their photograph taken unless they are engaging in a public duty. The two types of consent are; explicet consent which is all very official with a signed contract or such and implied consent when the individual is posing in the photo or it is clear they had no objections to being photographed.

Other main areas a journalist should beware of is; revealing state secrets or ‘official’ secrets, revealing commercial secrets or revealing facts about a person they would have expected to remain private.
Confidentiality

McNae's states that traditionally there are three elements that work towards a breach of confidence. Namely;

• Information obtained must have a 'necessary quality of confidence'. Information CAN be freely used if it is within the public domain BUT if it is obtained in a way that breaches confidence of a person or organisation then it cannot be used
• If there is an obligation to keep the information private then you cannot use it freely
• There must be an unauthorised use of the information to the detriment of the part communicating it. The person who the confidence is being breached must not suffer in any form of detriment as a direct result.

For a claimant to successfully prove a breach of confidentiality has been made they must prove every one of these points.

One big case which reflects privacy and confidentiality is the Max Mosely case from 2008. Max Mosely was the head of Formula 1 racing and was caught to have hired five prostitutes for a Nazi based orgy in London by the News Of The World but the High Court ruled that this was not within the public interest and that Mosely had a right of provacy and so damanges had to be awarded.

WINOL happenings

A Ramble -

I haven't been blogging about WINOL of late, for many reasons. Mostly because after I leave TAB9 and go home I can't bring myself to write about the week as I'm usually low in spirits. However, I will be writing a critical reflection very soon so I thought I should write about the last few weeks.

The last time I blogged on WINOL was the really bad news week so to continue from that, the next day I was ushered into a meeting with the editor, Chris and Brian and stripped of my news editor role as 'didn't seem happy' doing it. This translates roughly to; 'You are shit and we're replacing you'. Fair enough. It was a very bad week but I think sometimes people lose sight that WINOL is a University course and everyone is on a learning curve. Never mind... I was given a new role as Entertainments Editor and as upset and embarrassed as I initially was I decided to get stuck in and try my best to come back from it.

Enter Chesney Hawkes...

I noticed that Chesney was due to play at The Railway Inn on Wednesday night, the day of the bulletin so I thought if I could only get hold of him I could ask him to come in before the show to promote it and talk to us about what he's upto at the moment. I emailed The Railway begging for contact details to no avail, and emailed a media officer in connection with him but still nothing. Then as a last resort I tracked him down to his Twitter account and found a personal email address. I sent a quick email asking if he would be interested and 'tweeted' him to check his emails. I didn't expect a reply but thought there was no harm in trying and of course there wasn't... in fact he replied within half an hour agreeing to come down to the studio before his sound-check. After ALOT of running around and organising here is the final outcome...



...needless to say it didn't go exactly smoothly in the live run and I'm sure I will have "Can I start again, oh are we live?" haunting me through-out my career. I definitely let nerves get the better of me but managed to hold it together for the interview.

I haven't managed to bag any other big names since then, as of yet. But as the saying goes - watch this space. My role as Entertainments Editor seems to differ each week depending on what I can get hold of. One week I was presenting 'What's On' which we ran into a package - by my entertainments reporter at the time - about the fireworks procession which worked quite well.


The Training Week -

As I have touched upon, WINOL morale was at an all time low recently and this started to show in the output that was being produced. Chris intervened and called for a training week so everybody could spend the week training up on roles they've been wanting to turn their hand to but haven't had the chance and there wouldn't be too much pressure to perform.

Initially I wasn't keen on the idea and thought it was pointless producing lots of bulletins of perfected old packages as I felt this was time we could be spending producing a fresh bulletin but the outcome was good. All the 2nd years got involved with different roles throughout the three days and some 3rd years dedicated the time to making a show-reel for their portfolio.

During training week it was decided that my 'What's On' section and 'Win With Winol' should collaborate with two presenters bringing an element of relaxed studio chat to the table. With Lucy as the 'Win With Winol' presenter we went out about ways to do this. In the end we decided on standing and addressing each other informally. It worked ok but I felt we rehearsed it too much and the end result looked a bit wooden. During this week I had a local band as a guest to interview who gave us a performance. Here is how it went...



Up To Now -


This week the dynamics of Win With Winol and What's On changed once more when I went out to film on location. I went down to the Winchester Christmas market ice rink to film it as I thought it would be relevant to what I was talking about and would look visually more attractive than yet another studio produced piece. I think the extra effort and time paid off and I'm quite happy with the out-come.



I am fast becoming the cheese queen of WINOL but to be honest... I'm quite happy with that title :) Bridget Jones eat your heart out!

Ciao x