"Kate Middleton 'hounded'", "Heat sorry for Jordan son sticker", "Young deaths coverage questioned"

Headlines like these are more and more prevalent in the media today.  So it's no wonder that the Press Complaints Commission has just released figures showing there has been an increase in complaints of 70% since 1996 and 31% since 2006 alone.  Commenting on the increase the PCC chairman Sir Christopher Meyer said in its annual report:

"It is our continuing duty at the PCC to uphold high standards, not least through providing effective remedies to the victims of bad journalism. But it will, against the background of proliferating news sources, be increasingly our role to help the consumer choose between what can be trusted and what cannot."

And here lies the issue.  The rise of CGM has seen an explosion in media outlets.  As Orville Schell, Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley, UC states:

"The Roman Empire that was mass media is breaking up, and we are entering an almost feudal period where there will be many more centers of power and influence.”

All of these media outlets, new and old, traditional media and social, are now competing to chase the same fragmenting audiences. There is an ever greater pressure to release stories first, and there is more media 'real estate' that needs filling.  This isn't just bloggers, but also the traditional media journalists embracing the brave new world.  More and more they are being asked to blog and even broadcast.  And this is where it comes full circle as it's the bloggers who are exerting the influence.  Simon Waldman, director of digital publishing, Guardian Unlimited explains:

“Bloggers, through their links, are dictating what is important on the net because they are basically linking to things that make Google think it’s very important.”

In the rush to break a story or fill some copy, over and above the desire 'to haste and paste' it can be very tempting to sensationalise without the same level of fact checking that previously occurred.  This is something that the PCC acknowledges, stating that the majority of complaints in 2007 related to on-line articles.  And tellingly, over 75% of the total complaints concerned accuracy.

The need for the consumer to be helped identify which media to trust and which not to trust has never been greater.