When does a piece of writing count as being in the public domain?
Is it legitimate to pick it up and reprint in full under a picture byline, once it has appeared on the internet?
The Mail and the Australian had a jolly little spat in June about Mail online snippets that bore a striking resemblance to stories that had appeared in the Australian.
Is it more acceptable to lift copy if you give full credit? 
SubScribe admits to having been dismayed  to be at the end of a caustic tweet from Nick Cohen after running an extract of one of his rather good articles in the Columnists page of this site. It was supposed to be a compliment. 
So it's an interesting sphere to examine.
A couple of weeks ago, this blog was surprised to find that both the Telegraph and the Mail carried first-person pieces from Jonathan Krohn, the first journalist  on Mount Sinjar in Iraq, where the Yazidis were beseiged and dying of thirst after fleeing ISIS.
Krohn was freelancing, and is renowned as a wunderkind, but it takes some kind of superman to produce two completely different colour pieces about airdrops and rescue efforts for two papers on the same night.
A little research showed that he had filed the "Mail" piece to the Sunday Telegraph on Saturday and that it had been posted online in full. It was, however, cannibalised to form part of a portmanteau splash for the print edition. SubScribe thought this was a waste of a scoop - and the Mail apparently did, too. For there it was on page 7 the following day.
Krohn has now been in touch to say that he filed to the Telegraph, for whom he was contracted to write. He wasn't remotely dismayed that his story had been carved up. He was delighted to have the joint splash byline and to have got the exclusive. The treatment, he said, was the Telegraph's call. To an old sub, that came as an astonishingly refreshing attitude and for a moment lifted the gloom about the future of the trade.
Krohn added that he hadn't written for the Mail. Mobile and satellite signals were unreliable up on the mountain and when he got down on the Tuesday he discovered a number of emails in his inbox from the Mail, asking if it could.use his material.
By the time Krohn read them, someone in Kensington had taken the decision to go ahead anyway, and there was his original copy in all its glory, complete with picture byline and boast about "the first Western journalist to reach Mount Sinjar".
SubScribe assumes that a large cheque is in the post.

Subs are the forgotten tribe of the newsroom, unloved, blamed for writing in mistakes, blamed for failing to spot mistakes, blamed for rewriting rubbish copy, blamed for not rewriting rubbish copy. 
They toil in the ungodly hours of the night and morning. Where once their sole concern was the words, now they are checkers, typesetters, coders and who knows what else.
They work more Sundays and bank holidays than they have off, while reporters and desk staff expect to turn in for no more than one in three or four.
And they don't get expenses.
Maybe, then, there was a dash of shädenfreude at work last night as they prepared the bank holiday paper. For they served up a crop of punning headlines that hadn't been seen a thousand times before.
I'm not saying they were all box fresh, but they were nowhere near as tired as some of the headlines produced in the mad heat of the modern newsroom.
The Express came in with "dank holiday", the Star "bank brollyday" and the Mail "the sopping hill carnival".
I'm not saying these are examples of genius, but they do show a level of enthusiasm beyond the old "bank holiday washout".

No plaudits, however, for the Mail with its puff and feature head: "Dearest Dickie, so fizzing with passion he even called Mrs T darling!" No. If he did call Thatcher darling it's because he called everyone darling. It was a verbal tick, as meaningful as "like" as in "I was, like, standing at the bar and, like, this bloke came up to me and he said, like..." In other words, it was the very reverse of passion. Apart from that, it was a good read.

Talking of dear Dickie, the Times gave him two full pages of obituary. The Register, however always starts on a right-hander, so it was split into two single pages. Couldn't that travel ad have been pushed back for once, so that Lord A could be afforded a spread that would have looked so much better?

Jonathan Krohn is by any measure an exceptional young man. He published his first political book at the age of 13 and followed it up with a second a year later. In between he made a William Hague-like appearance in front of an American conservatives conference. Now, at the great age of 19, he is reporting from Iraq for the Telegraph and the Economist.

The top of today's Telegraph proclaims in red and black:
Iraq's mountain of death Telegraph reporter is first to witness devastation of trapped families
With such a coup, you might have expected the paper to splash on the report. It is a compelling, but calmly written first-hand account from the top of Mt Sinjar that mostly eschews the first person. There is more than enough meat in the copy to justify the top slot, which is instead given to the Revenue's latest move against wealthy tax avoiders.

The report continues with a number of quotes from people on the mountain and voices of authority. He concludes with the words of an MP who says: "We have one or two days left to help these people, after that they will start dying en masse."

The Guardian also has a first-person account from Iraq. Martin Chulov reports from Duhok that half the people who had been stranded on the mountain had reached safety via Syria. Unfortunately, the paper doesn't tell us where Duhok is in relation to the mountain or even give it a dot on the map on its inside spread. But again, it is a compelling read, calmly told.

The Mail, in common with the Independent, i and Sun, carries a piece on its front about the alleged burial alive of 500 Yazidis and the abduction of 300 women. The paper devotes four inside pages to Iraq, including a first-person piece on page 7.

Hang on, didn't the Telegraph have the first Western journalist on the mountain?
Ah, it's the same reporter. Maybe it's a syndicated piece. But the style here is quite different from that in the Telegraph:

There is a lot more "me" journalism here; perhaps the Mail wanted something a bit more boastful. But looking closely, it becomes apparent that this is a completely different account. This writer must be really special to produce two separate reports for two British newspapers on the same day - and  with numerous people quoted in each.

A quick google reveals Krohn's youthfulness and precocious background - and a link to a Sunday Telegraph article starting "Mount Sinjar stinks of death..."
Sure enough, it is the selfsame piece published in the Mail today.

The strange thing is that it wasn't printed in the Sunday Telegraph. A few paragraphs have been  woven into a wrap splash for which Krohn is given top billing in a joint byline, but much of the best material, including the comments of the people he met on the mountain, is missing. 
Nevertheless, he was pleased enough  to tweet:

Inside the Sunday Telegraph is a spread that includes the splash turn, a graphic, a commentary from Lord Dannatt, and a good colour piece from Richard Spencer on ageing Peshmergas hoping to protect Erbil from IS forces.
But wouldn't you want also to make more of the one available eye-witness account from the mountain where we had been given to understand tens of thousands faced dying of thirst?

Even today, there is no link to that original despatch from Krohn's later account or from any other report of the day's events. Is this deliberate, and if so why?

And as to the Mail, what was the deal that led it to print the whole of Krohn's first effort, but without the front-page "first man up the mountain" fanfare we have come to expect from the paper?
It may not matter much in the grand scheme of things, but it's all very peculiar.

In the meantime, here's a taste of the 13-year-old Krohn in action: 

Local world is scrapping the freesheets that serve Saffron Walden, Royston, Huntingdon, St Neots and St Ives and will instead offer readers in those areas special editions of a revamped daily Cambridge News. Which costs 55p.
The announcement today had all the positive spin of any such change. Richard Duxbury, the newish managing director of the Cambridge stable, said: 

Extensive research? Excellent. One wonders, however, what form it took. It might be imagined that writing about what's important to your readers is a fundamental. It would be surprising, though, if these communities told the researchers that they would prefer to spend £3 a week on a daily paper with a page or so of local news than to pick up a freebie entirely devoted to the area once a week.
The limited circulation information* available suggests that most of the weekly readers don't buy the daily, so what makes Duxbury think they will start doing so rather than switch to (or stick with) the rival papers produced by Archant?

*The Saffron Walden Weekly News had a circulation of just under 20,000, according to last year's ABC figures; the Cambridge News sold 18,500.

What does the editor think? Paul Brackley is apparently as excited as his boss:

This again begs the question: Isn't reflecting what is happening in the local community the purpose of a local paper? When did this become something to boast about? Is he not doing that at the moment - or at least setting out to do so? Is he suggesting that the teams producing the condemned weeklies are failing in their duties and that staff 20 miles away will do better?
Will the weekly staff keep their jobs and, if so, will they continue to be based in their local towns? Will they work from home or hotdesk it in Cambridge? 
Nigel Brookes, the editor of the Royston and Saffron Walden papers, sounds confident on the Royston website and Walden e-edition:

His readers, however, are unlikely to have shared his enthusiasm when they saw today's paper (below, alongside last week's edition). For they are to lose something rather lovely: 56-60 pages of local material with lots of pictures, readers' letters, local adverts, good property sections, boosted by the usual syndicated features and puzzles.

Will the new daily edition be truly local or will it have a Cambridge or even national splash? Today's Cambridge News has a picture of Boris on the front - hardly a local boy. And if the ambition is to produce a daily version of the existing freesheets, what hope is there of finding a splash every day?
Saffron Walden and Royston each have populations of around 15,000. Take that up to 20 or even 25,000 with surrounding villages and we can see it's quite a challenge to come up with a lead story once a week, let alone every day.
Factor in that the area was last year named the second nicest place in the UK to live and you can imagine a tranquil rural community that won't generate the crime, poverty or racial issues of, say, Newham or the Liverpool suburbs.

Meanwhile, when will editors learn that brighter does not necessarily mean better? Local dailies have been describing themselves as "bright" for as long as I've been in journalism, but the truth is that people don't want their local paper to look like a poor man's redtop. Yes, there are excellent regional dailies out there that are every bit as smart in every respect as the nationals. But they are the exception. For the rest, straight, simple and accurate is the way to go.

I digress. The "vibrant" new-look Cambridge News will also, Local World promises, give readers a greater opportunity to get involved, contribute content and debate the issues that matter to them.
Contribute content? Ah, UGC. Naturally.

Local World is, of course, David Montgomery's outfit and he has spelt out his mission statement in detail (albeit in gobbledygook). It's a frightening document, but, as SubScribe has said before, at least he has a vision for the future of the local Press. The Cambridge paper was named regional newspaper of the year a couple of years back and in its Evening News incarnation had a strong reputation and some excellent editors, including Bob Satchwell and Colin Webb. If these changes reverse the decline in circulation and allow the paper to grow, it will be terrific. 
If not, the Saffron Walden readers at least have somewhere to turn to for their weekly fix (even if is half the size and subbed in Norwich - but that's another story).

Did you turn out the lights between 10 and 11 last night? Did you leave a single lamp burning? If so, was this a deliberate act of remembrance or the usual bedtime routine?
Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War. Today is the 30th anniversary of Richard Burton's death (the actor, not the explorer). Tomorrow is the 125th anniversary of the opening of the Savoy. 

Anniversary mania is a condition that had historically been controlled by keeping the features department in quarantine. But then along came open-plan offices and dodgy air conditioning units and before you knew it, the disease had become endemic in newspaper offices and quickly spread to all areas of public life.
Every decade after every slightly significant advance had to be marked with a book, an interview, a film, a television special (backed up with another book).

The American bicentennial in 1976 was a biggie. So was the Queen's silver jubilee the following year.
You'd expect the golden and diamond celebrations to be clearer in the mind - what with being more recent - but they are much fuzzier. Mugs and sovereigns for the kids, Brian May at the top of Buck House, Brian Wilson control-freaking it over the party at the palace crowd for the gold; a sodden river pageant and its dire television coverage, Gary Barlow, the Madness Our House light show and the Duke in hospital for the diamond.
You can have too many parties and pick up too many stray balloons and damp flags to maintain enthusiasm for another shindig round the corner.

What do you remember about 2005 and the bicentenary of Nelson's victory at Trafalgar? Do you know or care what has been planned for next year to mark the 200th anniversary of Wellington's victory over Napoleon at Waterloo? Or  if anything is in the pipeline for October next year to mark the 600th anniversary of our archers' success against the odds at Agincourt ? (One imagines that people were too busy worrying about the Western Front to have concerned themselves with jollities for the 500th.)

Yesterday the country was apparently united in remembrance of the boys sent to their deaths in the high summer of 1914. Boys sacrificed because the whole of Europe had taken up such intransigent positions and mobilised forces to such an extent that the Queen's grandfather and his two cousins had little choice but to wage war with each other, once Gavrilo Princip  obligingly fired the starting gun.

A hundred years on, against the distant clamour of neighbour fighting neighbour and brother fighting brother in Israel, Syria and Ukraine, we heard the sirens of platitude from European leaders, a solemn celebration of peace and lessons learnt.

The Press, too, dutifully fell into line;  backbenches vying to produce the starkest front page, the most evocative headline. 
"The world remembers" proclaimed the Times wraparound - untruthfully, for this was essentially a European weep-in. There were pictures from London, Belfast, Balmoral, Liege, Mons - and  Afghanistan, because we still have troops there.
And against what background was this sombre sentiment set? A picture of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, who could  as well have been heading across the grass to a country church wedding as to a  memorial service. 
The tell-tale gravestones were safely at the back of the wrap; the far more evocative picture - Paul Kingston's photograph of a Second World War veteran saluting a statue of a First World War tommy -  kept inside.

The Sun had Prince Harry looking noble above the heading "Harry's hero", and the Mail almost hit the jackpot with Kate and Harry - if only the Archbishop of Canterbury hadn't been in the foreground. 
It wasn't only the royals on  front-page duty: the unknown soldier was pressed into service again, with a lone candle on the tomb at Westminster Abbey, while young men dressed in early 20th century uniforms and a shower of poppies provided the Express and Star with their cover pictures.

There is, of course, no one left who served in the war, no one left who remembers the individuals who died. But we can create the illusion with photographs of old soldiers from other conflicts. Royalty with heads bowed, old men with campaign medals pinned to misshapen blazers, Chelsea pensioners, and Beefeaters among the Tower of London poppies are all brought into play.
[Paul Cummins's installation which will eventually have more than 888,000 ceramic poppies is, incidentally, the most imaginative, moving and spectacular memorial of all. SubScribe has been surprised by the limited space devoted to it in the papers so far, but Wills, Kate and Harry went to see it today, so it will no doubt figure prominently tomorrow.]

Those boys of a hundred years ago who thought they were fighting for King and country, for a great cause, did they want to be remembered like this - as characters in a giant act of enforced national breast-beating; their personal letters to their mums read out to the world?
If they believed they were engaged in the war to end all wars, what would they think of the symbolism of a prince wearing medals celebrating his grandma's longevity on the throne  carrying a lamp around a Belgian field while hundreds of his contemporaries adjust to life without the arms and legs blown off by roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan?
What would they think if they knew that far from "learning the lessons" of the Great War,  their country would go on to send nearly half a million more young men and women to die in a score of conflicts all over the world; that not a year would go by in the following century without British troops being involved in combat somewhere?

Of course we should honour the fallen. Of course we should remember and acknowledge the day that set the world on such a bloody path. But these events don't feel real, they don't seem heartfelt and instinctive. This is orchestrated homage and we are in danger of wallowing in this sea of reverence as we did in that ocean of sentimentality after the death of Diana. 

That initial spontaneous show of respect by the people of (now Royal) Wootton Bassett was the real deal, but it turned into a ritual and then a tourist attraction, until the town was finally swamped.
We appear to have an unerring ability to take a pure moment and reduce it to a source of entertainment, an occasion to publish a souvenir supplement, to snipe at a politician over the wording on his wreath or to assess the fashion sense of the lesser royals.

There will be many sad centenaries over the next four years - of  the Easter Rising and the Russian revolution as well as the Great War. We shall also see the 70th anniversaries of VE Day, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of VJ day, the 60th anniversary of Suez, the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement.

Would it not be good if these could be marked with restraint and respect, rather than as an opportunity to sell a book, plug a television series or give away a free bone china thimble (plus p&p, collect the whole set for £25).

Both of these splash headlines are true. Yet neither tells the truth.
Yes, the NHS is to fund a sperm bank for lesbians - and for heterosexuals and bisexuals and transexuals. In fact, for any woman in need of the service. That includes, as the Mail on Sunday's sister paper tells us today, single women.
It will also be open to all ethnicities, so we could just as accurately have had the heading "NHS to fund sperm bank for Muslims" or "NHS to fund sperm bank for gay Jews".
We could even (in much smaller type and probably not on the front page because it's so inoffensive)  have "NHS to fund sperm bank for young white widows of our brave boys serving in Afghanistan".
Except that in that instance, the implied outrage would be that only £77,000 had been set aside from the £100m NHS budget to help such women - and that they would be expected to pay £300 for the privilege of using the service.
It's the way they tell 'em, as Frank Carson would say.

Over at Gatwick airport, a woman arriving on a flight from Sierra Leone collapsed and died after disembarking. There is an ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone. There are fears that the virus could find its way into Britain. So yes, there's a scare (terror's a bit extreme) and yes, there was a death.
The woman in question did not, however, die of ebola.
It's the way they tell 'em, as Frank Carson would say.

Why are we lying to our readers like this? Why are we setting out to shock and alarm them? Do we think it will sell more papers?

After all, that's all we care about, isn't it? "You're only in it to sell papers" is the insult routinely thrown at journalists. Proprietors like Murdoch are interested only in profits and power. 

Well no, actually. Journalists have an inherent and insatiable hunger for news. We chase and write stories because we are interested and we think others will be interested. We are compulsive gossips with a capacity for absolute discretion. We always, always want to be the first to relate a snippet of news, yet are often the most impossible people to get to talk.
When we have gathered up our goodies, we want to lay them out on a wonderful table for others to feast on; for our effort and skills to be appreciated and savoured. Newspaper proprietors provide that table and some - including Murdoch - share our delight in setting out the best china, the shiniest cutlery, the ripest fruits. 

Alas, newspapers are not charities run for the public good. They are businesses. They have to make money to survive - and that means attracting paying customers to our restaurants of news. 
So we should always be aware that If we put prime steak on the menu and serve reconstituted mince, we will lose our customers and our reputations and ultimately go out of business.

It's not much of a joke. Perhaps it's the way I tell 'em.