PCC investigates journalists' use of social networking sites

One side issue relating to the Bridgend story - yesterday, on the Radio 4 teatime news magazine show PM, I heard a report saying that the Press Complaints Commission is investigating the way journalists use social networking sites like Facebook and Bebo. You'll be able to hear the report via the BBC's Listen Again til next Tuesday - it starts around 47 minutes in to the show and is about five minutes long.

The hook for the package, it seems, was the way journalists reporting the suicides in Bridgend have used social networking sites. They've trawled pages on Bebo and the others, reading messages and helping themselves to photos which are then run in the newspapers. Relatives and friends of the deceased have said they find this upsetting.

We've talked a little bit about this subject in general in the Online Journalism 3 class I do on Mondays. Increasingly, journalists see Facebook and the rest as useful tools - they go there looking for material and (often) have no qualms about using photos, arguing that people chose to make their pages 'publicly available'. But is this really ok? The PCC is looking into it and trying to develop some guidelines.

In the meantime, there's a certain irony in the way journalists who have suggested that social networking sites might have played some role in the suicides rely on them at the same time for material and take that material without asking for permission or thinking about the effects their publication of it might have.