What is the point of an editor? To set policy, steer the ship, provide leadership, go out to lunch. 
Who should an editor serve? The proprietor, the staff, the reader.
All of those. But the key concern in all of this is the reader. Start there and everything else will flow naturally. Understand what concerns the reader - and that means telling them what they need to know as well as what they want to hear - and you shouldn't go far wrong.


This week we have seen a prime example of what can be achieved by an effective editor. And a prime example of what can happen without an effective editor.
The Home Office minister Karen Bradley has told MPs that interim measures will be put before Parliament in the next couple of months to stop police and HMRC looking into journalists' phone and email records to try to identify whistleblowers unless they convince a judge that it right to do so.

This important move to protect journalistic sources is a direct result of the campaign started by Press Gazette when it learnt that police had gone through Tom Newton Dunn's phone bills to find out who had leaked the Plebgate story to the Sun. 
That story was written on September 2 last year.

Press Gazette soon learnt that this was not an isolated incident and that some forces were using the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act to "spy" or "snoop" on journalists. The choice of verb may have been melodramatic, but this behaviour was clearly counter to the freedom of expression provisions enshrined in Article 10 of the Human Rights Convention.

Press Gazette wrote to police forces asking about their practices and was rebuffed by many, who said it was too costly to answer such questions. A petition was started asking the Interception of Communications Commissioner to act, attracting more than 1,600 signatures.
The acting commissioner did, indeed, act even before the petition was presented to him. He, too, wrote to every force in the country and they answered. It later turned out that the Act had been used to obtain information about the phone records of 82 journalists.  
The Mail on Sunday reported that its journalists' phone records had been trawled to reveal sources of the Chris Huhne speeding ticket story - sources that a judge had specifically ordered should remain anonymous. Liberal Democrats made the overhaul of RIPA party policy, the Home Office promised to review the guidelines for its use. 
All of that happened within six weeks of that first Tom Newton Dunn story. 
But when the guidelines were reviewed the draft changes suggested only that a special note should be made where the records to be examined involved people in sensitive professions involving confidentiality - journalists, lawyers, doctors, for example. 
Press Gazette attacked the issue with renewed vigour, encouraging people to respond to the draft before the consultation period ran out. 
The Metropolitan Police were meanwhile refusing to engage with PG, rejecting a Freedom of Information request as "annoying and vexatious" because the website had had the temerity to ask six questions on the subject.
This month the interceptions commissioner submitted his report  to the Prime Minister. He found that  police were not paying attention to Article 10, that they should be told to do so and, as belt and braces, judges should have to approve warrants to look at data in the hope of finding journalists' sources. David Cameron and Theresa May accepted the recommendations, but it was still not clear that action would be taken before the election.
Until today.

Karen Bradley's promise comes just 24 weeks after that first story - an astonishingly speedy and successful outcome for Press Gazette under the leadership of Dominic Ponsford.
Ponsford and his news editor Will Turvill have been nominated for two big campaigning awards for their efforts. They are up against stiff opposition and may not emerge triumphant. But their industry should make some special effort to acknowledge their work - some recognition at the Press Awards would be appropriate - on behalf of their readers: the journalists in this country.
Ponsford is, you see, an editor who understands his readership. He set up the British Journalism Awards to recognise public interest journalism, ethical journalism that makes a difference. He has never condoned bad practice, but he has defended those he feels are being ill-used or made scapegoats by the machines of the state or their employers. 
This is what an editor should be doing.

We can also see what an editor should be doing when we look at the Daily Telegraph. 
The paper's response to Peter Oborne's explosive account of life on the paper since the sacking of Tony Gallagher was at first limp, then pathetic and has now scraped the bottom of the barrel. To use the deaths of two people to smear a rival shows such an extraordinary lack of compassion, sense of proportion and basic news judgment as to beggar belief. Did whoever put today's paper together really believe that this was an issue of such importance that it should appear on the front page? Did they really believe that this was a matter of interest to the readers? Why should the Telegraph's audience be remotely concerned with the working environment of another newspaper group? Or that the Guardian may or may not have changed one headline last July? 
The Telegraph may genuinely have believed that the HSBC story was old, but once a story has traction you can't just ignore it. If the Telegraph thought that the BBC and the Guardian (it's unclear how the Times became included in its triumvirate of 'leftwing Labour soulmates') were rehashing old news for political reasons, it could have written a piece pointing out its own previous coverage of this story. If there were indeed a story to refer back to. Instead it just ignored it for two days and then presented it as one where the villains were HMRC, Miliband, the man in the moon - anyone but HSBC.

Private Eye had written much about the absent coverage before the Telegraph's former chief political commentator and writer of editorials called the paper to account.
Oborne's blog led to appearances on television and radio and was well covered by the Guardian, Independent and Times. The Telegraph wrote nothing. Readers who didn't listen to the Today programme or watch Channel 4 News must, therefore, have been bemused when they encountered a lamentable full-length leader scattering accusations at all and sundry and bleating about the lack of attention everyone had paid to its MPs' expenses scoop. 
Funny that. I didn't notice rival papers scoffing at that story. I do remember everyone scrambling for the Telegraph the moment the first editions came up to see the next instalment and rushing to catch up. I do remember the then deputy editor of the Times, which of course turned down this gem, describing it as "the gift that keeps on giving". I do remember everyone crediting the Telegraph in their coverage. I do remember the industry recognising its work with a shower of awards.
The Telegraph is so confident in its defence of itself that the "news" stories today about the Guardian and Times carry no bylines. Buzzfeed reports that the author of the front-page suicide story was seen arguing with the newsdesk about it. The comment buttons on the website are absent from the stories and from the leader - although readers were able to comment on previous editorials this week on such subjects as Brian the horse and Putin in Ukraine. Does this mean the Telegraph doesn't think readers would have anything to say on the matter (in which case why publish the stories?) or is it afraid that they may not approve of what has been written and how it has behaved?
Peter Oborne accused the Telegraph of a fraud against its readers. Its response this week reinforces the perception that the readers are the last people it is concerned about.  
A strong editor would never have found himself in such troubled waters. But instead of steering this once-great ship to safety, whoever was at the helm ploughed on through the ice floes and straight into the iceberg.  
The Telegraph under Murdoch MacLennan and Jason Seiken has done away with traditional titles in favour of directors of content. Chris Evans is the weekday editor, Ian MacGregor in charge of weekends. We have heard from none of these four men this week.
So the question remains: who is editing the Telegraph?

Also on this subject:
Peter Oborne quits
The Telegraph strikes back
A layman's guide to the relationship between editorial and advertising
Blurred lines in the native advertising newsroom

Press Gazette and its editor Dominic Ponsford, above, have played an absolute blinder with their Save Our Sources campaign, which called for judicial oversight of police checks on journalists' phone and email records.
They now have the Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister, Home Secretary and Culture Secretary on side and the promise of action in response to the Interception of Communications Commissioner's report yesterday.
That report found that police chiefs signing off applications to look at journalists' data had not paid sufficient attention to Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which enshrines the right to freedom of expression and sets out the special circumstances in which that right might be curbed.

The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act - the only law under which police may look at these sorts of records - stipulates that for an application to be granted, it needs to show that access to the data is necessary and proportional. That means the prospective public benefit needs to be greater than the potential damage caused by the intrusion.
The commissioner's report states that in most of the cases involving journalists' records over the past three years, those criteria were not met. The report suggests that that may have been because neither Home Office nor  ACPO guidance on the subject addressed the question of Article 10. In other words, nobody thought about it properly.
That is unsatisfactory, troubling even, but there is no suggestion in the report that the police were abusing their powers under the Act. On the contrary, the report says: 

The report lays heavy emphasis on the importance of freedom of speech and its various safeguards in domestic and international law. There is abundant recognition of the "chilling effect" that the disclosure of sources can have on people's willingness to speak out in the public interest, a recognition of the journalist's role, and an acknowledgement that data secured legitimately for other purposes might be used to uncover sources who should remain anonymous.
But this is no love letter to the Press. One of the grounds for seeking access to data is for the "prevention or detection of crime", and the report underscores the point: "The Act does not restrict the acquisition of communications data to serious crime which is defined at section 81(2) and (3) of the Act."
It continues:

RIPA was passed by Tony Blair's Government in response to a perceived terrorist threat, so it is inevitable that it will be described as an anti-terror law. As to whether crimes need to be deemed serious, this is relevant with regard to journalists because while RIPA may not require that the crime under investigation is serious, CPS guidance in relation to Article 10 does. As the commissioner's report states:

The report goes on to quote the CPS guidelines:

The commissioner's report regards this as an indication that "prosecution, or even a criminal investigation, should be seen as a last resort reserved for the most serious cases".
So how wrong it it of the media to talk about serious crime?

The key concern for the commissioner was clearly the protection of sources, not of journalists. It was also, presumably, the key issue for Press Gazette, since it labelled its campaign Save Our Sources.
There has been celebration today of the recommendation that a judge should approve applications relating to journalists - but most reports have omitted the caveat in the second half of the sentence from their intros. Here it is in full (my underscore):

Even under the commission's formula, journalists could still have their phone and email records examined by the police on the say-so of a senior officer for other purposes - for example, if they are victims or suspects of crime - although a second recommendation says that the officer considering the application should consider "collateral intrusion" and "unintended consequences"
Why shouldn't they? some might ask. No similar protection is proposed for lawyers, doctors, priests and their confidential dealings with clients, patients or parishioners. Perhaps their respective trade journals should kick up a fuss as Press Gazette did.

And how about all the other people whose personal data are scrutinised? About half a million applications are made by public authoirities every year for the right to access phone and email records. The commissioner learnt that 608 applications over the past three years (0.1% of the total authorised by the police) related to journalists' links with public officials - and not all of those involved looking at the journalists' data. In 24 of the 34 investigations, journalists' records were not examined. 
There is also the Wapping effect. Eighty per cent of the applications came from officers working on Operation Elveden, which looked into alleged illegal payment of public officials by journalists. And remember News International's Management and Standards Committee voluntarily handed over masses of material, so the cops would presumably in many cases have been asking permission to look at what they had in their hands.
Exclude Elveden and the total number of applications relating to journalists' data was equivalent to less than one per force per year. Put that way, as it is by the commissioner, it seems modest. Put another way, as it is by Ponsford in his Press Gazette blog, there were still 124 RIPA applications for telecoms records of journalists who were not suspected of any crime. 

That isn't right. And it is right for the trade magazine to highlight this. It is also right to ask the circumstances of these applications and, at the very least, for the targeted journalists to be informed.
Legitimate concerns have been raised about the use of RIPA to uncover the sources of the Plebgate and Chris Huhne stories. The CPS declined to prosecute the Plebgate whistleblowers, saying: "We have concluded that a jury is likely to decide that it was in the public interest for the events at the gate to be made public." In the Huhne case, a judge specifically ruled that the source should not be identified, yet the police continued their pursuit.
It is therefore in the public interest for the police to have to explain their actions in other non-Elveden cases. 
But this business of police looking at people's metadata without having to consult an outside authority is not a worry exclusive to journalists. We are a speck on this landscape. 
This morning's papers reported the proposed change in the law as a triumph for the freedom of the Press, proof that vindictive police had been abusing their powers:

This last is from the Mail, which also carried a leader on the subject. Its news story started:

David Cameron has performed a U-turn over Press freedom after insisting a judge must sign off police snooping into journalists’ phone records. In a significant victory for the Press, he promised safeguards to prevent forces abusing anti-terror powers to expose potentially-embarrassing confidential sources who blow the whistle to reporters.

It is an important moment for our industry. But at a time when journalists are too often seen as self-serving and self-important, would it not have been good at least to avoid the very language criticised in the commission's report?
And even better to have paid some attention to the other one and a half million people whose privacy was invaded under this act over those three years?