You’ll see that users now need a social media account – Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn – to authenticate their login to comment. This reflects The Irish Times’s view that social media now forms a central part of our engagement with our audience. In effect, we’re aiming to move on from the rather antiquated concept of linear comments on articles towards facilitating a more dynamic set of real-time conversations around the many subjects covered every day on our website.

As part of this, the other big change you’ll notice is that, when you post a comment on the site now, it will appear immediately. Previously, we pre-moderated comments, which often led to frustrating delays. It also made it impossible for people to engage in the real-time online conversations they’re used to having these days. Now, with immediate posting and with comment threading, we hope you’ll find these discussions much easier.

As part of our move away from pre-moderation, we’ve drawn up new Community Standards for users posting on the site. These standards are intended to make irishtimes.com a safe and welcoming place for people with a wide range of opinions and perspectives to share their views in a mutually respectful manner. In order for the new service to work as well as we hope it will, users should carefully read the Community Standards and check that their comments don’t breach them.

Registered users can use the system to flag posts which they believe breach the standards. These will then be considered by Irish Times moderators.. Any reader can also submit a more detailed complaint about inappropriate material by clicking on the link provided.

I hope you find this system an improvement on the previous one. We plan to roll it out over a larger number of articles in the days and weeks ahead. As we do so, feedback from you, our readers, will be invaluable and you can be guaranteed it will be taken on board.

The tweeting world is a bubbling, talking soup. Hear it simmering away. Dip in your ladle to immense delight but also at great peril. Tweeting is a medium of social communication fruitful for all sorts of activity: marketers gauging tastes, protesters sparking revolution and journalists “reporting”. But the semantics of “social media” are uneasy – the term has been applied to map emergent areas of communication that mutate as soon as we attempt their topology. To attempt to professionalise such social media may be foolhardy.

RTE’s Frontline programme on the presidential candidates appears to have given us the tweet that will be heard throughout history. The use of this mass-addressed instant texting mechanism as a media informant has reached an apotheosis. Effectively anonymous, a single tweet helped shape opinion, magnified through its use in the second medium of television. Double whammy. Pop, we have known for a long time, will eat itself.

The Frontline debate debacle has resulted in calls for an inquiry into the use of tweets and much focus on the need for their real-time, live-on-air authentication. Implicitly, the chapter illustrates the need for guidelines for the use of tweets by journalists of all media.

Analogies have their use. Here is one: people talk in bars and cafes, on street corners and on the telephone. Much of what they say is true, much is false. It is profane, factual, scandalous, offensive and entertaining. It is locked into its context, even – and perhaps especially – by the most skilled communicators. Imagine a roving device, a Jules Verne electronic ear, could eavesdrop on all this talk. It would be amused, wonderstruck, interested or perhaps insulted. If that roving ear belonged to a broadcast researcher or print journalist, it is unlikely the eavesdropped result would be transmitted or written up without clarification.

For, at best, tweeting is rich, vibrant gossip. It drives as lead vehicle in the parade of social media. It is an infinite megaphone, a chariot for opinionated ego. It is no surprise journalists have been among the communicative hordes to embrace tweeting – for work and for pleasure. Like talk, email and telephone calls, it unavoidably serves as a vent for opinion and as a barometer of reaction: “What’s up? I’ll bloody tell you what’s up.”

Tweeting can be a fine media for quick-fire reaction and for instant provocation. It is also an arena of stultifyingly banal and witless statements. And it can be deadly boring, its stock in trade including much by way of “I am going to make another omelette” and “I am still listening to the Velvet Underground”.

The one thing tweeting definitely is not is a professional medium – its nature is chaos not order. It is one of the social media, remember? That means human beings communicating badly. Attempts to professionalise tweeting are misguided. They lead inexorably to a second debate over how employees identified with a firm (a carpet showroom, a website, a PR agency, a newspaper) use tweets. When do your opinions cease to be safely allied to those of your employer? If you use the f-word in a tweet, are you damaging a corporate image or merely speaking socially to your mates as you see fit? As a professional communicator, do you accept your employer having a say in how you communicate in the evenings or at the weekends? Does your employer agree with your stance on omelettes or the Velvet Underground? When a schoolboy sprays graffiti on a wall outside of school hours, how much does the issue depend on whether he was wearing his school uniform or not?

As RTE is discovering, tweeting is a communication device for which the user manual is still evolving.

@MrJohnFleming

However, most reports of the event, whether in newspapers, online sevices, or conversations on Twitter, focused overwhelmingly on the comments made by Alan Crosbie, chairman of the company which owns the Examiner and Sunday Busines Post newspapers. Those comments were certainly eyecatching:  Crosbie’s contention that there was a ”threat to humanity posed by the tsunami of unverifiable data, opinion, libel and vulgar abuse in new media” was guaranteed to get some reaction. But they didn’t fairly reflect the span and depth of the issues addressed over the course of the day.

Such is life, you may say. It’s inevitable that news organisations will latch onto the most colourful quote. And Laura Slattery, for The Irish Times, and Christine Bohan at The Journal both gave some flavour of some of the other contributions.

But the focus on Crosbie’s comments, the comments themselves and the inevitable snarkfest which followed on Twitter and elsewhere showed up once again the depressing shallowness of the ‘debate’, such as it is, about how media is transforming and what implications that transformation might have for our society and culture.

The same phenomenon could be seen around opinion columns by Fintan O’Toole and Conor Brady published this week in The Irish Times. As it happens, I didn’t agree with some of the content of these pieces, and thought they illustrated the conceptual hurdles faced by people coming from a print background when faced with the glorious, turbulent, messy, liberating force which is the Internet. But those faults paled into insignificance beside the glib, ill-informed nature of much of the reaction.

Is it possible to have a coherent debate about new media without descending into a sterile ‘new vs old’ argument? It seems to be possible in the UK and US, where journalists, bloggers, theoreticians and others are engaged in some really interesting, provocative ongoing discussions. Unfortunately, Ireland still seems to be several years behind the curve.

Note: a couple of people asked me to post the opinion articles I wrote for the newspaper recently on RTE’s birthday and on the proposed new public service content charge. So I have.

ON THURSDAY morning, Minister for Communications Pat Rabbitte appeared on Morning Ireland to answer questions on the mooted replacement of the television licence with a new universal broadcast charge. I know this because I listened back to the podcast on RTÉ’s excellent iPhone app, thereby illustrating the point Rabbitte was making: technology is rendering redundant the archaic concept that you need a radio or television set to listen to radio or watch television, or that you should require a licence for such a device.

Yes, the majority of households still have a TV set (although in some the box in the corner has already been replaced by a sleek computer monitor). But broadcast technology is increasingly being supplemented or entirely replaced by the distribution of digital content over the internet. As has been noted elsewhere, this technological shift is disrupting traditional distribution patterns, opening up possibilities for multinational services such as Netflix, iTunes and Amazon, while threatening the revenue models of TV and radio channels, both publicly funded and commercial (or, as in the case of RTÉ, both).

But it also throws open the wider question of what “content” now means. In an era when journalists in the RTÉ newsroom are writing articles for its breaking-news site, and their counterparts in The Irish Times are shooting videos for theirs, assumptions about what the old categories of “broadcasting” and “print” mean are up for grabs. What does this mean in turn for a definition of public service broadcasting? Increasingly, the regulatory and legislative structures, which are only a few years old in this area, look unfit for purpose.

It may have passed its sell-by date, but there are good arguments for the traditional licence fee. If you accept the proposition that public funding should form a part of the broadcasting landscape, the current system gives broadcasters much-needed protection against undue pressure from the government of the day. Wrapping that funding back into general exchequer spending would almost certainly undermine broadcasting independence.

However, there have been mutterings for years about decoupling the charge from the ownership of a receiving apparatus. Rabbitte’s predecessor as minister for communications, Eamon Ryan, was fond of thinking aloud on the subject. Although those thoughts never yielded anything particularly tangible, he did rightly point out that reconsideration of the licence-fee structure would inevitably need to take account of changes in the broader media landscape, and in particular of the new competitive environment in which newspapers, broadcasters and websites now find themselves competing against each other for the first time. “We need to ask ourselves how we will actually fund broadcasting and, indeed, fund newsrooms in general, because it is a real issue in the present climate,” he said last year.

So far, Rabbitte has been silent on this subject. The move to the new universal charge, which is unlikely to be implemented before 2014 at the earliest, has a relatively clear and simple rationale. Licence-fee evasion is costing up to €25 million per year, while An Post’s contract for administering the system and inspecting homes costs another €12 million.

With a process now under way to register all households in the State for property tax, the opportunity exists for the first time to eliminate evasion and also cut down significantly on administration costs. In that sense, what’s proposed is just a bit of good housekeeping, eliminating waste and maximising revenue, while being seen to move with the times. It would, however, be unwise for the Minister to ignore the fact that cutting the link between funding and traditional broadcasting brings to the fore questions that have profound implications for media diversity in Ireland into the future.

What are the definitions of “broadcasting” and “publishing” in an era when rte.ieproduces articles and irishtimes.comproduces video clips? On Morning Ireland, Rabbitte surmised that the only way in which the people who sent emails protesting the proposal to him could have heard about it so quickly was via rte.ie. It didn’t seem to occur to him that they might have picked it up from one of the other online news services in the country. He went on to say that “a huge number of the population now get their news not from sitting down and watching the nine o’clock news but accessing the arrangements that the public service broadcaster has put in place”.

Indeed they do, but the picture he paints is incomplete. The “arrangements the public service broadcaster has put in place” are in competition with and complementary to a range of other news services, including the one provided by The Irish Times.

In 2014, what will the justification be for funding only operators who use the traditional broadcasting transmission network if funding has been decoupled from the use of that network? At the moment, 7 per cent of the licence fee goes to independently produced programmes of “high quality” on subjects such as culture, heritage and media literacy. But to be eligible, those programmes must be broadcast on radio or on television, rather than distributed online. This seems nonsensical under the new funding system.

More importantly, who will set the limits to RTÉ’s online development and ensure that media diversity is maintained? The thorny and unresolved issues between RTÉ and the commercial broadcasters pale in comparison with those posed by the definition of public service and a level playing field in the emerging new media landscape. And the current division between regulatory bodies such as the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland and Comreg starts to look as out of date as the licence fee itself. Rabbitte may have a bit more work to do to be ready in time for 2014.

IN THE history of Irish politics, only one electoral result can be unequivocally ascribed to the influence of television. In 1997, the voters of Donegal South West elected Tom Gildea as their TD in support of their campaign to retain their traditional deflector systems, which allowed them to pick up British TV signals from Northern Ireland. This week we’ve been celebrating 50 years of Irish TV, but there’s been little or no mention of Gildea.

The narrative of “indigenous” television allows little scope for the transnational nature of the medium, both in terms of the “foreign” channels we watch and the “foreign” programming on our domestic channels. At the same time, many of the most popular programmes on television are Irish-produced. The history of Irish television, from the means of production through the control of transmission to the desires of the audience, is not easily simplified.

Television on this island actually began with the launch of BBC TV in Northern Ireland in 1953, but the history of Irish TV is inevitably dominated by RTÉ. From its inception, RTÉ has had to compete in large parts of the country with British broadcasting, widely and often correctly considered the best in the world. Facing both ways has therefore been a natural position for the broadcaster from the beginning and continues to this day. Simultaneously criticised for behaving like an arrogant monopolist in its own market and being a pale imitation of its British counterpart, RTÉ’s often defensive reaction to criticism is to some degree understandable.

Therefore, it has always been in the broadcaster’s interest to promote a simpler counternarrative, where all our imaginations have been shaped by its programmes and our lives enriched by its home-grown content. But, while some of its stars and programmes down the years are admired and even loved, it’s not so clear that the broadcaster itself is valued in the way the BBC is by British audiences.

Yes, over the years, RTÉ has done a fine job of covering the great national setpieces. And yes, you may feel a twinge of nostalgia at that clip from Wanderly Wagon or from an old All-Ireland final, but the Reeling in the Years effect relies largely on the fact that, when it came to filming Irish people in their natural habitat, until the last decade or so RTÉ was the only show in town. In that sense, it owns our memories (now, they belong to YouTube).

Nor do overblown claims for its pivotal role in changing Irish society, for good or ill, over the past half-century, completely stand up. Irish-produced television was just one of the windows which opened up to the outside world, along with the dismantling of censorship and the arrival of consumerist popular culture. And it was a cautiously opened one at that.

If, then, rather than a window, Irish television holds a mirror up to Ireland, what does that mirror reveal? A reluctance to depart from received wisdom? A preference for the tried and trusted over the new and challenging? Occasional flashes of brilliance? A tendency to self-mythologise?

In all these respects Irish television, as embodied in RTÉ, is a pretty accurate reflection of the society from which it sprang. That is not to deny the contribution of the many gifted programme-makers who gave their talents to Irish television. We should rightly celebrate the work of dramatists such as Wesley Burrowes, documentary-makers like Seán Ó Mordha and children’s entertainers such as Eugene Lambert.

But looking at the track record of Irish TV, one can’t help wondering about the sins of omission rather than those of commission, the roads not taken. RTÉ endured and outlived the long reign of the engineers, escaped from the clutches of entryist political cabals and survived the malevolence of Ray Burke. For the most part, it avoided really serious clashes with governments (which itself might be seen as a mark of failure). And not unimportantly it brought pleasure to millions of people.

But it could have been much better. An opportunity was missed in 1978 when the second channel (now RTÉ Two) was not licensed to an independent operator – Ireland would have to wait almost two more decades for competition to arrive in the domestic market. As a result, the independent production sector, which in other countries really started to take off in the 1980s, stalled in Ireland. By the time Michael D Higgins unlocked some of the potential of the industry in the early 1990s, the moment had passed, and TnaG (as it was then) and TV3 emerged into a much more difficult market.

Any judgment on quality is inevitably subjective, but a strong case can be made for the past 15 years as the best that Irish television has seen. Is it a coincidence that this is the period in which we’ve started to see domestic competition? Or that people with programme-making backgrounds started to be appointed as directors general of RTÉ?

The fact that there’s been more of everything – more drama, more documentaries, more current affairs, more sport – does not necessarily mean that quality has improved. But there has been enough good work across all those areas and others to outweigh the inevitable missteps and failures. A larger independent production sector has contributed, while faster and cheaper technology has reduced the costs of production. The hopes of some activists that these developments might lead to a new strand of strong community television have not been fulfilled, though.

The medium now stands on the brink of another of the technological sea changes which define it. You no longer need a television to watch television: you can already watch any free-to-air Irish television channel online. Later this year, Netflix will bring its video streaming service to Ireland, putting another nail in the coffin of the dying DVD industry. It’s a simple (if illegal) matter to download the latest episodes of the hottest new international shows, or to access services such as Hulu. Electronics manufacturers are falling over each other to bring web-enabled television sets to market. And the giants of the tech world, Apple and Google, are hovering around broadcast TV as they did previously around music and publishing.

Since his appointment as director general last year, Noel Curran has refined RTÉ’s position: in his formulation, RTÉ provides an indigenous bulwark against multinational media entities such as Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp, which already dominate the Irish media landscape through their control of newspapers, transmission systems and TV channels.

It’s a more sophisticated reframing of the traditional argument in favour of Irish public service broadcasting, positioning RTÉ as the plucky little local hero rather than the big, bad State-owned monopolist, and it has come with a new openness to discuss sharing content with others (including The Irish Times ).

For that argument to convince fully, though, RTÉ needs to be aware of its own responsibilities when it comes to preserving local diversity in the digital landscape, looking to what the BBC has done in the UK in curtailing the growth of some of its online services. It also should become more generous in acknowledging that public service content is no longer confined to the current legal definition of public service broadcasters.

For the most part, the standard of political discourse around broadcasting in Ireland has been appallingly low, rarely rising above a point-scoring obsession with stars’ salaries. Too often, the regulatory and legislative structures put in place have been concerned with the commercial market rather than the marketplace of ideas. And, due to political inaction, there are glaring anachronisms: it’s not clear, for example, why RTÉ should still have to take responsibility for the national transmission network, or should have to deal with the fallout from the failed digital terrestrial television rollout.

Ultimately, the strongest arguments in favour of continuing to fund public service content are cultural, not commercial. In a globalised, media-saturated world, the need for Irish people to hear and see their own stories and experiences reflected and explored on screens of whatever sort or size remains.

There has been a lot of highly critical public reaction, particularly on social media platforms, to the events surrounding our re-editing of an article originally published in the Irish Times’s newspaper edition of September 9th, 2011. The article had been published anonymously, but, as revealed in a piece by Peter Murtagh in the Weekend Review of November 26th, its author, Kate Fitzgerald, had taken her own life before it was published. The revelation of Kate’s identity in Peter’s interview with her parents, Tom and Sally Ann, set in motion a train of events: the re-editing of the first article the following Monday following legal advice; a clarification of the reason for that re-editing on Wednesday, and, on Saturday, an apology to Kate Fitzgerald’s former employers, the Communications Clinic, which stated that “significant assertions within the original piece were not factual”.

The Irish Times has been heavily criticised for its role in this sequence of events, most recently and seriously by Tom and Sally Ann Fitzgerald, who have written of “ the insensitivity of the Irish Times and its inability to grasp how its position has compounded our grief, and attempted to stilt the national debate on depression and suicide.”

It is neither appropriate nor possible for me to go into detail on the specific legal issues involved in this case. However, reasonable questions have been asked by readers about our policies on amending or altering the digital archive on irishtimes.com, and I hope I can go some way towards answering those.

Editors at The Irish Times are duty-bound to ensure the work they publish does not expose the newspaper to potential legal hazard. This responsibility does not end at the point of publication; if an error has been made and published, it also applies to the range of online platforms for which we are responsible.

When we make mistakes, we are often required to publish retractions in the Corrections and Clarifications slot on the Opinion page of The Irish Times, usually stating that our original assertions were not correct. Many of our writers have had such corrections published about their work, baldly stating its factual incorrectness, and offering apologies to those affected.

Increasingly, though, those seeking redress from newspapers for perceived misrepresentations, inaccuracies or worse are as interested in the digital record as in the print retraction.. If there’s a serious problem with an article, that problem is arguably being perpetuated by its continued availability to online readers. For publishers, the pressing question becomes whether they are making a bad situation even worse in the eyes of the law by keeping that article available online.

As a result, circumstances regularly arise where the digital record requires amending. Serious errors of fact can and should be corrected. If we have failed to meet our own standards of fairness to everyone involved in a particular story, we should redress that imbalance. When these issues are brought to our attention, we act on them (although we may not do so if the mistake is very minor; each correction takes a certain amount of time to carry out and we have limited resources).

These corrections and amendments are firstly applied to the irishtimes.com archive, which is a digital record of all content published via the newspaper or as breaking news since The Irish Times went online in 1996. This is the format in which most users find and read our archived content. (The archive does not currently include blogs, audio or video, but we hope to include them in the near future.)

When we make a correction, we try to make it as clear as possible to users of irishtimes.com that a post-publication change has been made; for the last two years, we have done so with a line at the bottom of the text indicating that this has happened. Recent events show that we need to be even clearer with that message, always including the date that the change was made, the reason for making the amendment and, where possible, marking the changed text.

The same principles apply to amendments made following legal advice, which would normally be given on the basis that the newspaper and website are unacceptably exposed to a potential risk of action. Such advice is usually but not always given on foot of a complaint from a member of the public. However, we are often limited in the level of information we can give to the user in these cases; to go into detail is often impossible without repeating the information which caused the problem in the first place.

The irishtimes.com archive is just one of the platforms for our content. The newspaper archive is a page-by-page version of all daily newspaper editions published since the foundation of The Irish Times in 1859. Some imperfections and gaps exist, but it’s a pretty complete record of the newspaper’s history. The epaper, the daily digital version of the newspaper, available to subscribers from around 4am every morning, is also based on newspaper pages. In addition to these, we send our articles to a number of syndication and archive services and we supply content feeds on a contractual basis to a number of third-party customers around the world. In all these cases, we’re contractually committed to alerting the parties when any legal issues arise. Similarly, the syndicated services we receive from the Guardian, the New York Times and others have alert systems in place when problems arise at their end.

When we have reason to believe that the newspaper may be at legal risk due to something we’ve published, certain processes kick in. The most straightforward is the editing or correcting of content on irishtimes.com itself. A further decision may be taken to carry out a legal retraction of content from the other services mentioned. This is a more complex process in terms of the number of organisations involved, but for readers it probably seems much blunter as, since the newspaper archive and epaper are based on newspaper pages, the legal retraction takes the form of a redaction or crude blotting out of the relevant article on the page, with the words “Legal Retraction” attached.

In the case of Kate Fitzgerald’s anonymous article of September 9th, following legal advice we were asked to edit it on the afternoon of Monday, November 28th. The original amendment line in the irishtimes.com archive read: ‘’This is an edited version of an Irish Times article originally published on September 9th, 20111″. Following complaints from some users, we re-wrote the line on Wednesday morning to read: “This article was originally published on September 9th in The Irish Times. It was re-edited on November 28th following legal advice.”

The concerns expressed by readers about the clarity of the original notification were justified – although suggestions that we were deliberately trying to conceal the changes were not. Arising from this, we’re now implementing stricter guidelines for making such changes as clear as possible to the user.

On the evening of Friday, December 2nd, we undertook a broader legal retraction across archive, epaper and other services, which took place over that weekend.

Since those events, and the apology to the Communications Clinic published on Saturday, December 3rd, I’ve been reading and sometimes engaging with the angry debate on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere about the rights and wrongs of what was done and what has happened. I and my colleagues, including the editor, Kevin O’Sullivan, have been very aware throughout of the criticism of The Irish Times on Facebook, Twitter and blogs.

In my own personal view, as an organisation we can be legitimately criticised for not engaging more openly and immediately with public concerns about our actions. And people are entitled to their opinions about the rights or wrongs of those actions. We are to some degree constrained in what we can write about the details of this case, so it’s understandable if some readers believe we’re being self-serving or narrowly legalistic in responding (or not responding) to questions. Are there things that could or should have been done differently over the past few weeks? Yes. We need to learn from those to make sure we don’t make the same mistakes again.

However, unfortunate and painful though these events have been, we as professional journalists and publishers took what we believed to be the best action from an ethical and legal perspective. We believe that to have acted otherwise would not have been brave, but irresponsible. We acknowledge the hurt, bewilderment and anger felt by the friends and family of Kate Fitzgerald over what has happened, and apologise for our part in contributing to that.

Hugh Linehan is online editor of The Irish Times

However, his column yesterday depressed me, because it revealed again how even the smartest, wittiest, no-bullshit journalists are failing to get to grips with the challenges which now face newspapers.

The column takes a strong position (nothing wrong with that) on paying for content, arguing that newspapers need to agree among themselves that they will cease publishing their content free online:

The newspaper industry agonises endlessly about the challenges of the internet, and flagellates itself for failing to develop a “business model” for the online age. But then there has never been a business model, and there will never be a business model, which is based on giving it away for free.

Which would all be very true, if it were not completely false. In fact, free newspapers have been the single largest growth sector in the business over the past 10 years. And, more broadly, lots of thriving media businesses are based on ‘giving it away for free’. When Declan sings the praises of Newstalk’s sport programmes, he’s describing a product which is ‘free’.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t charge if we can and where we can. When it comes to the whole paywall/free debate, this writer is an agnostic. The challenge facing those of us in the traditional media is to find new ways to sustain credible journalism against a backdrop of declining revenues – whatever it takes. If charging for content forms part of a successful strategy, then I’m all in favour. But the jury is still out on that. And focussing on paywalls to the exclusion of other issues (such as, for example, the fact that the biggest problem facing newspapers isn’t declining circulation; it’s declining ad revenues) doesn’t particularly help.

It may well be true that the decision which newspapers, including this one, made in the mid-1990s to put all our content online for free was the Great Original Sin which has led to all our travails since. Certainly, if we’d known then what we know now, we would have done things differently. But here we are.  And, looking at the music industry, which took a diametrically opposed position on copyright, free online distribution, etc, one could argue that it might not have made much difference anyway.

For the music industry, the newspaper industry and (coming soon) the TV and movie industry, the same disruptive technology is having the same effects. To confront that challenge, we need to be smart and flexible and quick. And not be spouting nonsense like this:

Compared to Wikipedia, for example, the lowliest provincial paper in the most remote part of the English-speaking world is virtually a work of art, composed by magnificent writers and laid out by geniuses who are not just profoundly devoted to The Truth, they are decent, law-abiding, and they actually write under their own names.

Sigh… Wikipedia, for all its faults, is a magnificent, admirable, fascinating resource. Sure, you shouldn’t use it to cure your cancer, but to fail to recognise its extraordinary value is to be sadly out of touch with the real, actual modern world.

From there on, Declan’s column descends into familiar territory:  if it wasn’t linking to proper journalism, Twitter would just be about what people had for their breakfast. And bloggers are ‘just self-regarding bores without the writing talent or the commitment to the task that would get them a proper job in a newspaper’.

This is the sort of ill-informed rent-a-rant guff one expects from the Sunday Indo, but not from Declan Lynch.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Declan should really take himself along to the Irish Film Institute this weekend. Andrew Rossi’s fly-on-the-wall documentary Page One: Inside the New York Times is showing there from Friday. Not only does it lay out the real issues faced by newspapers with admirable clarity: it also, in media correspondent David Carr, has a real journalist who does the legwork and understands what’s going on.

‘Gadafy appears on Libyan TV in show of control’ read the headline of our later editions this morning, following the Libyan leader’s brief and Jacques Tati-esque address to his nation last night.

‘Please advise those writing headlines about Libya that the correct spelling of the Dictators name is Gadaffi not Gadafy as shown on the front page of your website. Pathetic,’ wrote one correspondent.

‘In all my life, and for all the years I have been reading about this guy, I have NEVER seen his name spelled GADAFY. Did you do that so that the dumb Irish people could read it phonetically, or is this the way it should have been printed for all those years? I am dying to know…’ wrote another.

Our spelling has also prompted a debate thread on Boards.ie, while the good folk at Broadsheet.ie helpfully point out that a Google search reveals that we’re the only news organisation to use this version. ‘It’s a solo run, dude,’ they comment.

Perhaps so. But, as our Foreign Correspondent Mary Fitzgerald points out in a recent tweet, “transliteration from the Arabic throws up several possible phonetic spellings…so New York Times uses el-Qaddafi, BBC uses Gaddafi, LA Times use Kadafi”

And, according to this 2009 post from ABC News, there are 112 different English-language spellings of Gadafy’s name on record.

Having discussed the matter with our Foreign Editor, it appears the Irish Times version is the same as that used by the Guardian up until a couple of years ago (it now prefers Gaddafi). To my eyes, our version looks slightly archaic, perhaps even contrarian, but to describe it as ‘wrong’ would be, er, wrong.

The Irish Times Stylebook contains several such unusual rulings, some of which cause unease among the editorial staff (acronyms are a particularly thorny issue). But from the point of a view of an organisation like ours which publishes more than 100,000 words a day, the most important thing is consistency and adherence to a clear set of agreed rules. How well we achieve that is a story for another day…

*Update from our Foreign Policy Editor, Paddy Smyth:

‘The paper’s  and the online edition’s house style on his name, used first in 1971  and then from 1981 consistently with some lapses, is Col Muammar Gadafy. This version, one of many acceptable uses, is based on a direct transliteration from the Arabic.’

‘Where’s the spellcheck?’ Irish Times reporters get to grips with video.

 As we expected, it’s been a learning process for everyone involved, and we have a long way to go. But, as this report by Eanna Ó Caollaí shows, we are getting there… at least, I think so. What do you think?

Click here to view the embedded video.

An uncanny likeness, we’re sure you’ll agree. but it caused us to wonder: who might be the best casting choices for our own current crop of leaders?  Here’s our first suggestion, for Best Actor in a Supporting Role:

We nominate:

What are your suggestions?