An interesting article in the UK Press Gazette on the ramifications of the recent arrest of the News of the World’s royal editor on charges of reading the voicemail of members of the royal household. Right down at the end, it mentions that journalists do it to their own rivals on the papers, and I remembered what happened when the Independent was first introduced to email: the internal system was thoroughly hacked before the paper even launched (as I remember, there was a way to copy to a file people’s internal messages before they had read them). Much of the juiciest reuslts ended up in Private Eye. Of course people will do these things in offices, if they can work out how to, and journalists are paid for rat-like cunning. Yet it seems ot me much more unethical to do it to someone you don’t know, in pursuit of a story, even though that has much more in common with the traditional picture of journalism.
There was one man on the paper who was an absolutely fantastic investigative journalist — a man who could find out almost anything about what the powerful were up to, and was brilliant at putting together scraps of apparently unrelated information into the bigger story. He was a dab hand at hacking the Atex system, and no doubt had the skills to deal with newer technology. The only problem was that he never, in his whole career, investigated more than one story outside the paper. All the rest of the time, his talents were devoted to discovering, and frustrating, the plots of his superiors.
I sometimes wonder what he does now he’s a freelance.