Night Jack,you may remember was the winner of the Orwell prize for blogging announced earlier this year.
Nick Jack was a member of the police force who wrote about the every day trials and tribulations of being in the force and wished,not unsurprisingly to stay in the shade.
That was until yesterday when the high court threw out his attempt to stop the Times from revealing his identity.
In what will be a landmark ruling,judges said that blogging was “essentially a public rather than a private activity” thus immediately establishing that pseudonymous web columnists writing the inside stories of their professional lives that they had no legal protection against their identities being revealed.
The Times' rational was that the officer was or could have been revealing confidential information that may be traced back to cases.
For those students of media law,those cases could be dealing with children or others who the law protects.
As Paul Bradshaw notes there is a public interest conflict here
the ruling has enormous implications for whistleblowers and people blogging ‘on the ground’. That’s someone else’s ‘public interest’.and adds that
With the disappearance of Nightjack (his blog has already been deleted*), we lose one more ‘voice on the ground’.
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