And there's this...from Graham

http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/5002482.article

From Graham - worth reading

Court allows journalist to defy order for notes

By David McKittrick, Ireland Correspondent

Friday, 19 June 2009

A Northern Ireland journalist won a significant legal battle yesterday against police attempts to obtain details of her confidential dealings with the Real IRA.

A judge ruled that the life of Suzanne Breen would be placed at risk if she was compelled to hand over material relating to the Real IRA killings of two soldiers near Belfast in March.

Journalists and human rights groups welcomed the judge's decision as significant to media freedom. Breen, the Belfast correspondent for the Dublin Sunday Tribune, had faced a prison sentence of up to five years if, as she vowed, she defied a court order to hand over information.

Police wanted to examine her computer, telephones, notes and all other material relating to stories that she wrote about the Real IRA in the wake of the murders of Sappers Mark Quinsey and Patrick Azimkar outside the Massereene army barracks in Antrim.

She said yesterday: "Today is a great victory for me and for the Tribune, but it's also a victory for journalists across Ireland and Britain and elsewhere around the world."

She had told an earlier hearing that the dissident republicans would regard any co-operation by her with the authorities as an "act of collaboration" with the security forces.

A campaign in support of her case attracted support from prominent journalists, academics and others and hundreds signed a petition organised by the National Union of Journalists.

In his judgment, the Recorder of Belfast, Judge Burgess, said there was a strong public interest in bringing the killers to justice, but he had to consider seriously the existence of a real risk to Breen's life.

He described the Real IRA as a "ruthless and murderous group of people" who, if Breen handed over material, would treat her as "as a legitimate target with the murderous consequences that could and may well follow".

The judge said that while the material that Breen held was likely to be of substantial value to the police investigation, he had to place considerable weight on the protection of life.

He said it would "be close to inconceivable as to how she, and potentially her family, could be protected."

I've updated my personal website

I've updated my website, but it is not indexed in google yet - see http://www.horrie.com. I have used some more advanced flash on this site. The idea is to build it up so that it can deliver yet more traffic and page rank by linking to the Winchester Journalism site and other Uni sites.

I've embedded the website on this messageboard using the embed code discussed below:

Using blog as a messageboard - on journalism sub-domain

I have discussed that you can strip down a Google 'blogger' blog using its simple dashboard menu commands so that you can use it as a messageboard. All you do is embed the blogger URL on any HTML page - and there you have a fully functioning content management system without having to set up a database or do any of the that server-side stuff.

Here's the HTML code.





So if you ever get access to the www.winchester.ac.uk server (maybe just to update course details) then you can embed a message board with all your own protocols and user policies. Of course you and the university have full liability for anything said. But this is a very quick and easy way to rig up a CMS, certainly.

Obviously the window containing the messageboard would be a lot wider when you use a university website template. It is plenty wide enough.

Big update on the journalism sub-domain

Added a lot of content to the journalism sub-domain. Could do with more contributors on this blog. All my law teaching notes are up there now, and I cross linked to these from Wikipedia. So you write some notes on for example Freedom of Speech and then you find the relevant page on Wikipedia and link from Wikipedia to your page. This works like a treat and sends up to ten people a day to the sub-domain - from America as well as the UK and a smattering of other countries. It shows how materials that are on the LN don't do much good beyond the the existing students. If you put these notes up in public you still do the same job, but you also get potential recruits, research collaborators and - sometimes - constructive criticism that you can use to improve and update your work. Check it out on Winchester Journalism

Beyond this does anybody have journalism-related notes that I can use on the site. The more pages with unique and good quality content, the better.