Guest speakers – Keith Hyatt and Michael O’Brien:
Rachel Manning was murdered in December 2000. Rachel was the girlfriend of Barri White – friend of Keith. On the 9th December 2000, Barri and Rachel had been to a nightclub, but had both gone home separately – Barri having gone to Keith’s. After being unable to get hold of Rachel, Barri assumed she had gone straight home. Three days later Rachel’s body was discovered.
Both Keith and Barri were arrested on suspicion of murder – leading to Barri being convicted of the murder of Rachel Manning and Keith being found guilty of disposing Rachel’s body and sentenced to 5 years imprisonment.
Due to the interest BBC’s Rough Justice had in the case, new forensic evidence was produced and resulting in both their convictions being overturned. Keith served 5 years in prison – in which time his business collapsed, his house was burgled meaning he lost all person possessions and he had nothing left on his release.
Even after this time, he is still yet to receive compensation from the government on the grounds that he could have been guilty of the crime. He is now a broken man who has very little in his life, but it is due to the determination and help from his parents – who he now cares for, full-time – that his innocence was proved.
The second guest speaker, Michael O’Brien, was part of the Cardiff Newsagent Three. Mike’s speech was very different to Keith’s due to the differing personalities. Mike was a typical ‘lad’, very cheeky and did used to get into mischief, but it was a totally different story when he was arrested on suspiscion of murder.
Mike and two others were convicted of the murder and robbery of Philip Saunders. It was due to his co-accused Darren Hall 
being a pathological liar which, led to him making a confession for the crimes they did not commit. During the years Mike was imprisoned he began learning areas of law with the aim of proving serious breaches of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 by the South Wales Police, and by doing so was able to take action against them. They won their appeal and were released and were given the biggest pay-out in British legal history - £1.1 million due to their civil action against the South Wales Police. Hearing from both Keith and Mike puts it all into perspective and gives you an insight into what they went through and how they’ve coped.
http://www.innocent.org.uk/cases/hurley.html
"If you can’t find a document in 30 seconds you might as well not have it."
This session was guidance on organising and using documents in the most productive ways.
- Sort the file.
– Index the file.
– Flag up important documents.
– Keep records of all work.
– Correspondence file.
It was advised that we all familiarise ourselves with the appeal [s] so we are aware of what have been ruled on previously giving us better grounds to look for fresh evidence.
HOLMES – Home Office Large Major Enquiry System – was explained in detail giving us more of an insight into what official documents created within HOLMES should include.
Six-Step Approach in Investigating a Claim of Innocence:
- Ensuring retention of evidence and case papers
- Understanding how and why the jury convicted the defendant
- Going beyond the trial document
- Investigating the evidence that led to conviction
- Proving innocence through DNA
- Making an application to the CCRC
Undertaking Fieldwork Investigations: Dr. Eamonn O’Neil – Investigative Journalist
Why should IPs visit crime scenes?
- Check evidence gathering,
- Make sense of material,
- Create fresh and relative narrative,
- Understand forensic processes that occurred,
- Track down fresh leads,
- Compare paper to the locus.
Diary of a Winchester Lady is our very strong aspect of our written content on WINOL. Poppy Murray is the columnist for this, and has provided all the content for this comment column. Once the column was up and running and articles were being produced on a regular basis, I thought it would be a lot better to have all these columns on one page of the site. This is not only better layout for the website, but also our audience will see all the articles written for this column. Through this, Poppy will begin to build her own audience who know to come to the site for her content. This will also be enforced now that we have a cartoon image of her specifically for the site. I was able to get this through a contact from Winchester Fashion Week. This was produced free of charge, on the basis that we accredit them.
Poppy’s articles are very strong and all have a clear angle. Each week she emails me her draft copies of articles and I give her feedback on ways to improve each piece. Poppy has fully understood the key aspects of a column piece and has been demonstrating that through her written pieces.
This week Poppy has written an article entitled: ‘Would you Rather’. This piece explores the values and viewpoints of young people and what they would rather do given two choices. She ends with bulletin points of advice from her own point of view, as a young person, which are amusing and will appeal to our audience. The only issue I had with the piece was a spelling error of Baz Luhrmann, singer of ‘Wear Sunscreen’. If this hadn’t of been noticed this would have been a fatal error, and just goes to prove the importance of editing, and checking your facts.
Coming up Poppy is to continue with her comment column as well as producing two fashion articles. One will take on the research of transgender modelling, and the other the explore current trends within the UK and looking into the views of International students on these trends. This is all in preparation for Maria Milano coming in, and will also give Poppy an area to cover, which she hasn’t looked into yet.
This weekend, also, Poppy attended the Ideal Home Show Christmas Exhibition, of which she has taken the angle of hypothetically having £1000 to spend to make-over her student room.
Poppy has produced a lot of content for the site so far, and it is all of good quality. The only thing I would like is for Poppy to produce 2/3 articles a week, increasing content with her article and general articles for features also.
The Freedom on Information Act 2000 allows citizens to request public authorities to disclose information, which would not otherwise be published. This Act is very useful to journalists, as it gives them the power to uncover information about the way in which we are governed and communicate this information to the public. In some cases, that public authority won’t hold the information being requested, or the request exceeds the maximum cost limits for free information.
‘Information’ is defined under the Act as ‘information recorded in any form’. Once information has been requested, the public authority has 20 days to respond to the request either giving the information requested or stating why they are unable to obtain it.
The information should be disclosed free of charge, unless obtaining the information costs most than £600 – national government departments – or £450 – local councils and others.
A current example which we broadcast on WINOL was Julie's FOI story uncovering the truth about the number of local police officers to have had convictions themselves.
Under the Act, a public authority is known as:
- National government departments and ministries,
- House of Commons and House of Lords,
- The Armed forces
- The National Health Service
- Universities, schools and colleges.
The UK’s security and intelligence agencies – MI5, MI6 and GCHQ are exempt from the Act, meaning they are not required to respond to FOI requests. The Courts and Tribunals are also exempt.
These are a few examples, which, under the Act are not considered public authorities:
- Housing Associations
- Charities
- Private Prisons
- Members of Parliament.
There are a number of factors all to do with the public interest, and which all should encourage public authorities to disclose information:
In some situations, the public authority may withhold the information requested on the grounds of public interest. This is known as Qualified Exemptions. If withholding information has a greater public interest than releasing it to the public then the public authority can withhold the information.
Sources in relation to journalists are very important. Journalists have a moral obligation to protect confidential sources and information. This was stated in the Press Compaints Commission - Code of Practice.
After six weeks of this semester, I am very pleased with the progress features has made. We have at least six regular features giving us constant new and updates features, which is exactly how a publication should be run. Having a regular Tuesday deadline means that we always have new features on the site ready for when the weekly bulletin and news stories are on the site. This is essential for a publication, because, if someone visits the site, in which the content has not been updated then it is very unlikely that they will return.
We are now in the middle of creating a number of restaurant reviews as well as game reviews. To my knowledge we have never had continual reviews before so this is a bringing WINOL to a new level within features especially as we have two different reviews each relating to separate aspects of our audience.
Having a regular comment piece is also a very strong aspect of our features page. Although I would prefer ‘A Diary of a Winchester Lady’ to have it’s own page with all of Poppy’s articles on it. This would be much more effective as we have a cartoon image of her specifically because the comment pieces are all produced by Poppy under the same title. It makes sense from a production point of view to have all of these articles on one page, as it is more direct for our audience when they visit the website.
WINOL Life is really starting to become a valuable asset to WINOL features. Not only does it gives us another production, but it also allows to invite outside guests who are specific to features, in to be on the show. This is a very good opportunity for all the feature writers to gain feedback as well as making WINOL more popular to editors in the area. We have two more episodes of WINOL Life to produce before the end of this semester. For our final episode, we have Maria Milano, Editor of InStyle website, coming in again who will appear on the show. For this show I would like to make it a fashion special due to the background of our guest. It will be very good for the feature writers to stem out and produce a different type of feature than the ones, which are regularly being produced.
In previous years, features have taken a while to ‘take-off’ this year however, the feature writers were all aware of the deadlines they had to meet and have all been very dedicated to producing content each week. Although we do have regular features each week such as, restaurant and games reviews, What’s On and our comment column, this does not mean that features are boring. It means our audience will be aware of the content we produce and will be inclined to visit the website again to see any continual features – such as the reviews.
People have the right to keep secrets, so long as the secret is not against the public interest. People also have the right to pass on these secrets to others with the expectation that they will not pass them on to others.
Doctors and lawyers are main examples of people who are under obligation to keep information private. This information will regard to their patients or clients, and has no right to be passed on to any third party.
If information is disclosed to a journalist from a third party, or a journalist comes into possession of confidential information, they may find themselves under a legal duty to respect the confidence of that matter.
A person who passes on information to a journalist may have received it confidentially. If the person who the confidence belongs to, discovers that information has been disclosed about them before a paper has been published or a programme has been broadcast, then that person can get a temporary injunction prohibiting publication of the confidential material.
Breach of Confidence:
A person is in breach of confidence if they pass on information which;
- Has the necessary quality of confidence – important information and
It must be very damaging to the person of whom the information was released.
All 4 elements of this test must be proven.
Privacy:
Article 8 of the Human Right Acts states:
‘Everyone has the right to respect his/her private and family life, his home and his correspondence.’
There is an expectation that the general public is entitled to know about the private lives of celebrities/people in the public eye. Many people view sport people as role models, and therefore should behave in an appropriate way towards their fans etc. Just because someone is in the public eye does not mean, private information about them should be disclosed. Some matters are in the public interest, in which case it is viewed that the public should know about the current matter.
Just because someone has the ability to take a photograph on their camera, does not mean they have the right to disclose it in publications, allowing a large number of other people to view it as well. You need permission from that person to publish that image/information.
Consent is vital in journalism.
If there is no consent and no valuable public interest then do not publish the story.
