Ian Burrell, a blogger on the Independent’s site has written the following article about the future of blogging, and it seemed to merit a light fisking.

Baroness Buscombe, the new chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, has ambitions for her organisation that go beyond the traditional newspaper companies.

She wants to examine the possibility that the PCC’s role should be extended to cover the blogosphere, which is becoming an increasing source of breaking news and boasts some of the media’s highest-profile commentators, such as the political bloggers Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes. Do readers of such sites, and people mentioned on them, deserve the same rights of redress that the PCC offers in respect of newspapers and their sites?

Guido specifically hosts on a server which is as far from the reach of UK (or any other) courts as possible and is a self-professed mischief-making Irish purveyor of gossip. Iain Dale is the editor of a political magazine and a wannabe Tory MP. Chalk and cheese in audience and appeal. How could even a reformed and effective PCC think that a socialist one-size-fits-all control system would work for those sites alongside the Telegraph? What next, the PPC taking over school magazines?

“Some of the bloggers are now creating their own ecosystems which are quite sophisticated,” Baroness Buscombe told me. “Is the reader of those blogs assuming that it’s news, and is [the blogosphere] the new newspapers? It’s a very interesting area and quite challenging.”

Eco-systems? Well TheEye has two splendid fish tanks…does that count? “Interesting” and “challenging” are alternate words for “power-grab” and “need to control”. What is it with this need to legislate for everything?

She said that after a review of the governance structures of the PCC, she would want the organisation to “consider” whether it should seek to extend its remit to the blogosphere, a process that would involve discussion with the press industry, the public and bloggers (who would presumably have to volunteer to come beneath the PCC’s umbrella).

She can consider all she wants. The press industry would love it (a socialist psudo-journalist once moaned at TheEye that she’d worked hard for some press journalism thingumy licence or other and bloggers were taking food from her mouth without being authorised by a closed-shop union) and the public wouldn’t care. Blogs like the excellent G.O.T. would simply be amusingly abusive about the whole charade.

The PCC regulates the press online as well as in print, and its remit also extends to the Sun’s radio operation, SunTalk.

Blogging, with its tradition of being free and unregulated, sees itself as very different. But is it really?”

Yes.