I have received an e-mail from BBC journalist Bill Thompson after a piece I wrote titled “Don’t Blame It On The Blogging” on the Blog Media website Blogger Idol claiming he might have done more due dilligence before blogging about an event organised by the Judge Business School in the U.K. which was under the Chatham House Rule.
The rule is part of traditional English heritage and works essentially more like an Honour Code which can be invoked by the organisers of any event: at heart, it means one is not at liberty to reveal any prescient details of a particular function. Thompson initially wrote about how the organisers were lax in their inviting him to blog about the event on the BBC News website:
During the evening session about the future of the media, I made lots of notes on my laptop. I suspect that the tapping away irritated the person sitting behind me, but it is the best way I have found to make sure I pay proper attention, and I tried to type quietly.
Afterwards I went home, tidied up the resulting 2,500 words of text and posted them on my personal weblog.
I took out the comments that I thought might be too revealing, cleaned up most of the spelling, cut the boring stuff, added some relevant links and hit publish.
... Unfortunately the organisers had forgotten to tell us that our meeting was held under the Chatham House Rule.
This is a convention, named for the London headquarters of the prestigious Royal Institute of International Affairs, that means everything said is non-attributable.
My response was essentially that "a worker shouldn’t blame the tools," and I wrote the following:
Thompson is a good writer, but he shouldn’t blame his own laziness to check the facts about an event on blogging, and neither should anyone else. It’s a poor excuse that is often used when a new medium is adopted … The fact is, blogging, like anything else, is just a medium, a platform. The age-old social norms and expectations still apply.
Thompson obviously sees it differently: “Hi there,” he starts:
I don’t think you’ve followed the point I was making, which is that the easy availability of a public medium - the Web - and tools to get stuff up there - blogging platforms - are changing the dynamics of some forms of social interaction, and that those who organise, host or attend meetings of this type need to take care. The organisers were sloppy, not me, since they had invited me as their token blogger - but I could have been acting maliciously too. Five years ago leaking the comments at such a meeting would have needed access to the press and someone willing to publish, now it just needs a blogger account. So I do think that in this case the new platform has a wider impact.
As much as I like Bill Thompson and really admire some of the great things he is doing for this medium - he is a champion advocate of New Media and has proved himsef a daring journalist to embrace radical new technologies so easily - I do not find myself being able to agree with him at all on this one.
Article comments
1 - Aaman
Illuminati Rules!
2 - AS
well you can have a go at thompson for not respecting other peoples privacy, but did you ask him if he minded you using the contents of his email in your various blogs?
3 - Daniel M. Harrison
"but did you ask him if he minded you using the contents of his email in your various blogs"
The same script had been pasted as a public comment.