To publish in print is fine, but to publish it online first is divine

Imagine the quandary, if you will.

You are a former red-top editor turned media commentator.

You write a lucrative column in the Evening Standard and you also have a rather new high-profile blog on the Guardian - launched recently to a crowd of respectfully dipping coronets.

Then you happen upon a bit of a juicy story - where the hell do you lead with it?

This is exactly the situation that Roy Greenslade found himself in this week when he had a piece alleging the management at The Telegraph had been trying to lean on The Independent to prevent its media commentator, Stephen Glover, from launching another broadside at the paper and its owners, the Barclay brothers.

Mr Greenslade, speaking alongside several other former Fleet Street editors yesterday, said that blogs were proving to be 'bottom-up journalism' where the readership was questioning and calling the writer to account.

He told the audience at the British Library: "Blogs are saying 'Journalism is not as special as you would have us believe it is' ... we have to admit that blogs are making a massive contribution. We have to accept that they are part of the active sphere."

He added: "Blogging is a new form of relationship with the reader.

"What we do in newspapers is tell people what we think, it's a top-down process. What blogs have done is to make a conversation."

You could be forgiven for thinking, therefore, that he might choose the web to break a story about alleged newspaper management interference.

But in fact the story in question was published yesterday, before the British Library talk, in the Evening Standard.

Mr Greenslade explained why to journalism.co.uk:

"The thing about this story is that I got it because I was writing my column.

"It was my column day when I noticed the Telegraph stories, so it was down to timing and intention and a deadline.

"I blogged it at 10.30am [on the day of publication] because that was the time when the first edition [of the Evening Standard] was launched."

Mr Greenslade followed up the story today on his blog, again pinning his colours to the wall in support of Glover, when he wrote:

"The journalistic community has been tightening its support around Glover and his editor Simon Kelner.

"This includes people who have suffered in the past from Glover's barbed prose and others who have no particular love for Kelner.

"As one former editor remarked: 'I don't care for either of them, but this is a matter of principle'. Indeed it is."

Words of noblesse oblige from the former Mirror man, made to ring more resonantly by the appearance of a pull quote from Edward R Murrow next to his staunch defence of Mr Glover:

It reads: 'Most of us probably feel we couldn't be free without newspapers, and that is the real reason we want the newspapers to be free'.

Quite.

But isn't that what the world wide web is all about? Why not break it on the blog next time?

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