Western Morning News Editor Alan Qualtrough uses sex case to wade into the internet

"Kept you up thinking about this then."

Helen: That, and your copyright complain show that your arguments are wearing extremely thin. You want to talk investigative journalism? OK. How do you know that Geoff doesn't have differing hours of work (and therefore differing sleeping times) to you? Do you know if he's an insomniac? Do you know if he had decided to stay up to watch something on TV, and then typed his reply to you from his laptop whilst watching it?

No, you don't. But, you assume that you've kept him awake. Well done!

Seriously, you're coming across as the pompous ass on this one. Pompous, misinformed and completely in the pocket of/employed by the publication that this article discusses, in fact.

Tsk. The discussion isn't about how nice Helen is.

But rather that the Editor of the Western Morning New's blog started with a post that not only aimed to stoke the fire of fear of crime and create a boogeyman out of the internet, but also aimed to make mileage out of a tragic news story.

He followed it up with a piece on a football huddle, which shows he was gunning for the big stories and contentious issues rather than chasing Google juice.

The latest entry (as of October 7) is more like it – milk protests in Brussels.

We shall continue to watch the Typefacing blog, which is 'about how we live, how we think and how we reflect it daily' (and so far isn't daily).

Wow, Helen's not a very nice person

I was just using the example of a bafflingly popular newspaper going the whole nine yards as with regards to propaganda. The Guardian's just as bad in it's own way. Well, certainly The Observer.
I never laid the blame for Iraq squarely at your door and I would assume that, as an obviously intelligent person, you would decry that gung-ho adventure as the ill-advised war crime it was. I was just saying (in admittedly rather wide terms) that newspapers generally do shape public perceptions for the worse and therefore, have been pretty dangerous over the years.
I'm all up for debate, but you can't accuse me of condescension on one hand whilst ridiculing the fact that someone from a "little South Devon homestead" such as mine should dare to air an opinion on (or care about truth in) the said universe. Perhaps you're not too far from the "gutter" I supposedly inhabit, after all?

Hi there

Helen's published comments were attacked by our spam filter for some reason. But now they are back.

Where did Helen's comments go? Great, now it looks as though i'm arguing with air.
Ironic.

Am I suddenly being censored because I don't fit your agenda? Not good for public engagement if only your contributers can comment.

Wasn't referring to the hilarious 'poopy-head' comment, Geoff. Though entertained by your lack of insight and your condescending manner. And I do find it funny that you lay blame for the Iraq War at my door without even knowing my position on it, if or what newspaper I was working for at the time. But complexities and the practice of asking questions don't fit comfortably with your rigid theories, which is why I don't have any desire to read your, self-confessed, 'amateur' journalism. It's probably why I didn't remember your name correctly.

Don't think any intelligent human agrees that The Sun is a good read - sexist and racist are just starting points, no? Though you don't credit anyone else with the brain to work that out now, do you?

Aren't you also a purveyor of comment on fact? Or have I missed something in these long essays you've submitted? Try harder next time. Sorry, I forgot you consider yourself the guardian of all truth in the universe from your little south Devon homestead.

Anyway, mustn't spend all day fighting in the gutter with you. Better things to do with my day.

Wasn't referring to the 'poopy-head' comment, Geoff. Though entertained by your lack of insight and your condescending manner. Nor do I have much desire to read your 'amateur' journalism.

Don't think any intelligent human agrees that The Sun is a good read - sexist and racist are just starting points, no? But you don't credit anyone else with the brain to work that out now, do you?

Aren't you also a purveyor of comment on fact? Or have I missed something? Sorry, I forgot you consider yourself the guardian of all truth in the universe from your little south Devon homestead.

Anyway, I must stop fighting with you in the gutter. Better things to do with my day.

It's Geoff, not George.
And, as an amateur investigative reporter myself (you can read my reports on these here pages) I tend to share your fears about the medium disappearing. Check out my blogs. Context is everything.
I'm sorry if I lost you there. Maybe I have a different bad taste threshold but calling someone a poopy-head isn't properly libellous in my book. And there's nothing paranoid about my outlining the accepted wisdom; that newpspapers are generally inherently evil.
In your line of work, you might have come across a website called youcare.com? They document irresponsible journalism.
The following link leads to a page of collected articles from The Sun newspaper, taken from the run-up to the Iraq war. With all these years of hindsight behind us and, given what we know now, it's a terrifyng read and a good example of fact/comment merging from our recent history.
http://www.youcare.com/?p=19

Graham - that's an interesting debate about facts and comment, especially as if you look at the reception of Jon Stewart's Daily Show in the US it's clear that there’s a public thirst out there for news facts presented with opinion, comedy and irony. There’s got to be some hope after Fox News, right?

There's a school of thought that says the future of internet news may well be to present facts within opinion, afterall people are bright enough to separate fact from comment and are tired of this 'flat Earth news' that Nick Davies talks of http://www.flatearthnews.net/ where, to really simplify the argument, every news provider repeats the same (sometimes false) information - generally PA - and investigative journalism dies. In fact, I used to monitor internet traffic to a national newspaper site and the opinion pieces/those with attitude always drove more traffic than the straight ones. People wanted to be engaged, whether they agreed or not.

Cptn, thanks for the time switch and I'm well up for the debate.

As soon as she thought she had me pegged as a tin-foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist, she stopped drinking in the points I was trying to make.

Typical.

Hi Helen

Thanks for your continued involvement. The People's Republic of South Devon site is intended for debate.

You're right that there is a danger of hypocrisy when discussing this issue – we were careful to omit details of the case to which Alan referred. Obviously, for you, that hasn't worked.

It is excellent that Alan has continued his blog, and we look forward to following it.

You would have won your bet about the picture, and because we aim to address readers' concerns, it has been changed.

Also, we've changed our admin time scheme from GMT to BST as it appears to have distracted you from the point.

Helen,
One of the major problems with journalism is that it all too often falls into the trap of believing that the public are terribly interested in comment over facts. This always appears to me to be extremely arrogant and preaching (the Guardian of course being a great example of this). I gave up reading newspaper editorials and columnists many years ago precisely because of the ill-informed scandal mongering which is endemic.
I have always believed that the only things that matter are facts and that journalists should report facts and not offer crass ill informed opinions. I think the PRSD has a legitimate right to take the p*** out of pompous cretins.
I read Aan's original blog which provoked this debate and I found it somewhat of a piece of non value-added irrelevance and therefore a good example of the the type of journalism I referred to above.

Since it's 8.47am and my post has been marked as 7.46am I'm assuming I should correct my post to: your 2.37am diatribe. Kept you up thinking about this then.

George, your 1.37am diatribe smells like conspiracy theory to me.

I hope no one seriously swallows the libellous, childish, ill-informed and paranoid prose you peddle from your armchair.

Looking at Alan's blog since - a post about Argyle players giving each other a hug and one on protests in Brussels - I don't think you can justify the wild claims made here about some sort of ideological crusade.

No axe to grind and a sympathy with your views about Murdoch and other press bias but, come on, this is a 500 word first blog you lot seem to have got yourself so worked up about and I'm purely a researcher in internet journalism with a distaste for half-cocked journalism and self-important spouting like yours. All power to you, however.

Allow me to widen this yawning spat into a pre-apocalyptic global context. I know it sounds like scaremongering, but sometimes, scaremongering is essential. Especially in the face of all the rampant misdirection that usually erupts on the back of things like this. Allow me to attempt to retrain your focus.

So I read the Vanessa George entry on Qualtrough's blog and, yeah, it's reliably pretty disgusting yet utterly symbolic of how mainstream news peddlers always capitalise on national tragedies in order to air their own opinions and point accusatory fingers at huge swathes of society. Usually it's the young, or something the young are affiliated with or interested in, that shoulders the ire of the prevailing hate-meme. You see, i'm allowed to comment freely because a) i've never worked for a newspaper and am categorically not a qualified journalist, b) therefore, I am not expected to apply the normal "rigorous journalistic standards" and lastly 4) because I am illiterate - but I would like my voice to be heard.

@Helen, it's the job of mainstream news outlets to propagate new bogeymen within the public's psychological domain - and it's been going on for ruddy years. Qualtrough's blog was cynical, painful and predictably pointless. Nothing but wet piffle spurted by an unimportant man onto his keyboard and injected into the digital ether like a massively over-confident fart. Yeah, I know what i'm walking into here... It is a horrific case that sadly inspires prurient public voyeurism and sniffy, snobby opinion pieces like the one in question. It is none of our business. It is a matter now for the children affected and their families. Editors, however, want to make it into a Zeitgeist moment. Politicians will smell the coffee and will proceed to rush out more ill-conceived and anti-libertarian legislation designed to "usurp" the problem - without ever examining it closely. Nice one, Qualtrough!

People can be naive about the power of the press in this country. Sadly, in this age, we have seen the emergence of the "Career Politician" who, by his very nature, kowtows to the press and various other corporate parties and is mainly concerned with generating headlines with his fancy new laws. We've had over three-thousand new laws passed under these past two parliaments, an' all!

At first, the press made us fear losing our children to the brain-destroying pulp of comic books and distasteful movies... then along came Marilyn Manson and Grand Theft Auto III - each with their own accompanying "retrofit" school massacre. Nowadays, it's social networking which will eventually turn our children into the demons we've been underselling them as since the end of the 1960's. Oh, and kill the godless BBC too. All of them.

Ultimately, they (the printed press) hate the internet because, despite what Qualtrough insinuates through his reptilian prose, the internet IS truly free and should defiantly remain so. The press is more about upholding the status quo and furthering vested, mainly undisclosed interests. The internet has all that, but it is much, much more than just a format. It is more a reflection of our society written in binary code. Humanity's cultural DNA database. Of course a few bad eggs will always pollute the slipstream, but that's unavoidable. The internet is eating mainstream news and will, in probably less than ten years, have supplanted it entirely. This is why Rupert Murdoch is sweating over how to make us cough up money for his propaganda online - which, I mention only in passing, makes the perceived "propaganda" on this blog look pretty tame in comparison. Is it propaganda just because you don't happen to agree with it? Who knows?

It looks a little like you've got an axe to grind. If you have a look around these pages you will see it's a generally inoffensive, gentle and left-leaning blog with mainly positive stories. I'd have felt much more unsettled if the Captain (or Our Dear Leader, if I am to act like the Stalinist of your subtext - it's ALL about the branding...MORE RED SQUARES PLEASE!!) had lead with an opinion piece about Vanessa George and the children who were horrifically abused in her care. I look elsewhere for heavy stuff. You can't correlate my view with some blanket "denial" of internet-based dangers. We all know that the world can be pretty hellish for an unfortunate two-thirds of its population, and yet; the internet can no more enable a pederast than a car would enable the metaphorical murderer fleeing his crime scene. We can all cry out for tighter car control, I guess, but does it all ever really add up to anything progressive or substantial? All this crying out like wounded Hyenas?

Why on Earth would a small fry like Qualtrough want to jump on the internet pederasty bandwagon with such a weak and pedestrian piece of writing? Who cares what he thinks about something like this? I say, good on the PRSD, as clearly no one else was going to counter Alan's mad typing.

That's the trouble with these piddly local papers. No cojones. No feelers. They never seem to be able to sniff out the real stories. The entrenched opinions of the editors and senior cabals who seem to dominate their newsrooms always come off as decidedly "Old Guard" and, at best, the resultant inky guff is only mildly comedic. I am a big ironic fan of the Herald Express. Sometimes I SWEAR Chris Morris is behind it...

Anyhow and in my humble opinion, this matter falls firmly within the PRSD's jurisdiction and, well, Qualtrough was being a bit of a poopyhead.

See, it's the internet. And, taken as a self-correcting, almost organic whole; it's fair, balanced, free and reliable. I could never equate the above superlatives with any of the newspapers you might have worked for Helen. Your rush to defend the subject of this article and simultaneously rubbish the author smells like sour grapes and/or nepotism. Your newspapers had most of us believing that Saddam Hussein was capable of deploying weapons of mass destruction against our cities within 45 minutes. What was that about propaganda? Those of us with a hunger for real information and a dial-up connection had the authority on Iraq from square one and we never bought the war. Now hundreds upon thousands are dead. You may have been a small cog in an even smaller wheel, but never mistake the true nature of the Devil's horrifying machinery. If, in an age of instantly accessible information, the citizens of this country continue to allow themselves to be lead by war criminals and frauds, then they get the printed media they deserve. People who actually read know where else to look these days.

You seem to be working on the assumption that the blog was launched purely to discuss the Vanessa George case - do you know this to be true? Have you interviewed Alan Qualtrough about it or are you just picking opinions out of the sky? Since you don't quote him, I imagine that's the reality. Doesn't seem like a very fair or balanced journalistic approach.

I think there's just a bit of hypocrisy running through your comment, Captn. Your story's first paragraph displays the kind of rabble-rousing hyperbole you seem to object to. You appear to have sensationalised the coming of a local newspaper editor's blog, which my guess is he'd be very pleased about.

There are many issues arising out of the Vanessa George case that could have been a point of discussion, not least that oft-addressed issue of CRB checks but I'm glad to say I found it far more interesting that Mr Qualtrough addressed the idea that the internet is a place of brilliant freedom but that that freedom comes at a price for some - those child victims of George an extreme and disturbing example. You can't argue with that without floating into a territory of denial and ignorance about what happens on the web. It seems like a valid philosophical point to make that has a little more depth to it than your stereotyping of the DMGT 'family' of newspapers.

Since the editorial team has run under Mr Qualtrough's stewardship for a number of years now (if I've done my research correctly) then I don't think you can argue he's made a late entry into cyberspace. And last time I checked there weren't many newspaper editors in this country writing a personal blog. All power to him, I wish him luck.

Having myself worked for local and national newspapers in print and online (not the Daily Mail, for the record) it frustrates me when I see shoddy journalism like this that clearly hasn't applied rigorous journalistic standards. Your idea that the blog was 'inspired' by the Vanessa George case being the best example since you clearly haven't supported your opinion in the way you should so as to be able to plead 'fair comment'. Puts you closer to propaganda than journalism, which now I think about it chimes quite nicely with the branding of this blog.

I'd also put money on the fact you haven't copyright permission to use the photo of Mr Qualtrough, it's taken straight off the WMN website, no?

Hi Helen

Thanks for your comments.

It's an issue which we kicked around the office for a while. The way we see it is that if it was part of an on-going blog by the editor, or if he'd picked up the issue of CRB checks, then we may have felt it was something more than pure cynicism on their part. And even the issue of internet security can be covered without the salacious quote we mentioned.

It was the editor's late entry into cyberspace, rather than that of the rest of their editorial team, that we were referring to - sorry if we didn't make that clear.

I don't think we suggested that it was an ‘order from high’, but rather a trait that runs through the culture of that family of papers.

Hope that clears some things up.

I've read the Vanessa George blog and the idea that it is 'scaremongering', 'pimps tragedy' and 'displays moral outrage' is ridiculous. It seems balanced and provoking to me - exactly how a blog should be in a forum where readers can make comments and continue discussion in a way that's not possible with a newspaper. To not write about one of the biggest cases in the country that falls on your patch would have surely been disappointing.

I think you display your frightening lack of knowledge about the newspaper industry by suggesting this is a Daily Mail 'order from high' or that editorial independence doesn't existence in the Northcliffe titles. I doubt that very much.

Many of the journalists at the Western Morning News have been blogging for a long time http://www.thisiswesternmorningnews.co.uk/wmnblogs... (I often read them)and there have been a number of internet driven projects - including this one with David Cameron: http://blogs.pressgazette.co.uk/wire/3577 last year so to suggest this is a late entry into cyberspace or, as Kevin claims, experienced newspaper journalists are unaware of the impact of the web on their profession is also laughable. You seem a bit behind the times in terms of the debate within the industry.

Just seen that the London Evening Standard is going to be free in future. They can't compete with free newspapers and the internet.

Is this the future for the Western Morning News and the Herald Express?

This week saw the UK being the first major economy where advertisers are now spending more money on the internet than the TV. Newspaper editors are now having to recognise that the future may not always see people spending £1 a day to read a newspaper - regardless of how many freebies they include, or how sensationalist they get.

But they don't like it. They don't like the democratisation of comment and news. And they don't like their views being equal in importance to anyone elses.