Nowadays it’s possible to pick up a picture without going out of the office, thanks to the millions who present themselves to public gaze on the internet. Helpful quotes are available too. The famous and the unknown put up their lives for scrutiny on “social networking sites” such as MySpace and Facebook, offering photos, diaries and descriptions of their interests and their friends. If anything should happen that makes them interesting to a wider public – an untimely death, a reported involvement in a crime, some injudicious email at work – those self-portraits and life stories are available to any journalist who trawls the sites.

This was the journalistic shortcut used after Seung-Hui Cho shot dead 32 staff and fellow students at the American university Virginia Tech in April, as the media around the world discovered not only that local bloggers were putting up graphic accounts of what had happened, but also that they could pull details of some of the dead from the students’ own web pages, posted on social sites. As The Daily Telegraph’s Shane Richmond explained to website readers: “It should be part of every journalist’s tool kit. All of us should know how to search Technorati, Flickr, YouTube, MySpace etc.” But, as Richmond also acknowledged, this initiative raises questions: is it safe to lift stuff off the web in this manner? Is it ethical to do so? Many who put the stuff up in the first place say it isn’t, not least the actress Gillian Anderson, who was upset to find thoughts written for her official website broadcast to a larger audience. She wrote later: “The fact is, I have not written to the site in a while because I have quite frankly been afraid to. I was shocked or rather appalled that my last entry of ramblings was published. What happened? When did Everything and Everything become mass public consumption? Since when have I been writing a BLOG!!??? What happened to PERMISSION??!! I am so naive. So, needless to say, I am a bit aflumoxed, flummoxed, aflutter? Angry, about the situation and what is safe to write about anymore.”

The tone is typical of the way people write on websites. And I should say that I, too, am transgressing the rule laid out by Ms Anderson at the start of her piece. It reads: “NOTE: This message is exclusively for Gillian’s fans who visit this web site. Please do not publish the contents (partially or in full) anywhere else on or off the internet.” It should be said that this is not a warning calculated to work with journalists. But Ms Anderson is by no means alone among web users in believing that websites should be accorded a private status never granted to the published word elsewhere. The debate will increase as journalists realise how much information is out there.

The likely suspect

In the old days, reporters would have pieced together something of his character by tramping round relatives and friends prepared to talk. They might have come up with a few pictures, typically years out of date. Naturally, the door-stepping began. But, thanks to MySpace, they had for starters pictures of the suspect alongside the kind of self-description that everyone knows spells serial killer: he called himself “The Bishop”, wore an army combat hat and wrote that he was interested in keeping fit. Conclusive, except that Stephens was, of course, released by police shortly afterwards and another man is now awaiting trial. Context makes a difference. When Stephens was under arrest his self-portraits looked just the kind a weirdo would put up. Once he was released they didn’t look much different from millions of others posted by young men and women on the internet.

Was it safe to lift his profile off the web? Yes – the Tom Stephens selected from the various Tom Stephens on MySpace was the right one. There was enough detail in his profile for there to be no doubt about that. Did his website entry convey an accurate impression of him? Well, as accurate as the media might have obtained from friends and acquaintances in the old days. They were, after all, merely reproducing what he said about himself.

The point about identification is important, because not only are there many people of the same name on sites such as MySpace, there are also entries set up by people purporting to be others. Now that MySpace is owned by News Corp, there are lots of spoof profiles claiming to be the News Corp boss Rupert Murdoch. Here is a typical one: “I purchased Myspace for $580,000,000 in July... but the news didn’t really cover that story. I am worth billions. Jealous?” You can also quickly find any number of George Bushes, Tony Blairs and David Camerons. I think the site purporting to be that of the Duchess of York is genuine. Certainly, the sites of those of her daughters, Beatrice and Eugenie, were, until the media took an interest and reported the contents. As a spokesman for the Duke of York told the Daily Mail: “The girls don’t use MySpace any more. They think it’s a bit too open. They are now using Facebook.” Spoofs are easy enough to spot when they involve the famous, but the young users of these sites are not above faking others’ entries too.

Providing you have the right person, the journalistic rule surely must be that you apply the same journalistic standards as you would to any other inquiry. Even when they are writing about themselves, people do not necessarily tell the truth. Just as journalists weigh the evidence of friends and neighbours rather than report it as a matter of fact, so the material on websites might not be as accurate as it appears. Or, seen in the cold light of day after the death of the person concerned, it may take on a greater significance than is warranted. There was evidence of that in another case where journalists trawled the internet for information about a young student, and to report the comments of his friends. Here, there was little to distinguish the MySpace entry of Gavin Britton, a first-year student at Exeter University, from those of other students who boasted that they liked to drink heavily. Like them, he posted pictures of himself with glass in hand. When he was found dead after a student party last autumn, the Basingstoke Gazette quickly found his entry on the site:

“Gavin boasted of his drinking on the Net – and died on party night,” ran the headline. The story provided more detail gleaned from MySpace: “One of the comments he had left on the page was: ‘If you’re not living life on the edge, you’re taking up too much space.’ The website also contains pictures of Gavin drinking, including one in fancy dress, from a wine bottle.”

There was an angry reaction from many of his friends, whose comments remain on the Gazette website: “It disgusts me that a couple of images on an internet profile site, and some off-the-cuff comments posted on said website, have gathered so much media attention. It is a known fact by all MySpace users that anything said on such a site should be taken with a pinch of salt – or as light humour.” But was the Gazette really taking the dead man’s lighthearted comments about drinking out of context? After all, he did die after drinking. Perhaps if the information had been gathered in the old fashion way, friends would have qualified their accounts of his drinking with the rider that he was no different from many other students. But wasn’t the juxtaposition of website entry and manner of death irresistible to any newspaper story? I suspect that Britton’s friends would have reacted against any story that raised his boasts about drinking, but the fact that the Gazette reached for his own words appeared to exacerbate criticism. There is a view among those writing blogs or using these social networking sites that, despite their easy accessibility, they are not actually public.

Blogs are public places

Journalists do grasp that point, which is why they have started to use these social sites as a means of publishing information that they could not otherwise find a way into. The News of the World presented a colourful piece about a girlfriend of Tony Blair’s oldest son, Euan, justifying the information and pictures by explaining where they had come from: “The News of the World discovered hundreds of photographs of 19-year-old Suzanne on the internet – all posted by herself on student networking site Facebook.com.” You can imagine the happiness in the heart of the journalist when he looked at those pictures, conscious that the Press Complaints Commission could not touch the paper on privacy grounds.

The Mail, following up the story next day, also took trouble to emphasise that this was in the public domain. Writing under the headline: “How Euan’s girl revealed her wild side on the web”, it wrote: “The Facebook.com photos were posted on an area of the website accessible to all Oxford University students. The nature of the website also means that anyone with an online ‘friend’ at Oxford was also able to access the pictures.” The subtext was clear: don’t try coming after us on this one, Number 10. We are in the clear.

Blogs do indeed tend to be open to the world. So do many areas of the social networking sites. When you create an entry about yourself on MySpace, anyone who visits the site can find you, unless you change the default position in order to make your site private. When you post a piece on Facebook, which has a huge following among university students around the world, it is not open to anyone, but there is not much point in being on it unless you make it open to groups of contemporaries – and once it is open to those groups, it is pretty much open, full stop.

That ease of access became clear to the Mail on Sunday in May this year when, to its irritation, pictures of Jeff Chevalier, the gay lover of the former BP chief executive Lord Browne, appeared in newspapers around the world. The Mail had signed Chevalier on an exclusive deal and worked hard to protect its asset. Unfortunately, it seemed unaware that the former male prostitute had posted photos and words about himself on an entry he maintained on Facebook. How many journalists had been keying the name Chevalier into social site search engines?

A walk around the web reveals furious commentary from those who believe the press have no right to seek information in this fashion – and from others who think it would be remarkable if they did not. L J Ulrich, a columnist on The Daily Athenaeum, the newspaper of West Virginia University, writes: “Like it or not, Facebook is a perfect starting point for investigations. The system is literally a treasure trove of information: names, addresses, cell phone numbers, political affiliations, interests, hobbies, linkcharted contact networks and countless photographs. This type of information makes journalists drool not just because it is readily available and easy to find, but it has been voluntarily broadcast into cyberspace. Anything found on Facebook is well within the public domain. If it’s posted, nobody can cry about how it’s used.”

This gets to the heart of it. These internet sites fulfil a fantasy many of us have had from our first days as cub reporters. Suddenly no one shuts the door in our face; no grey-faced, grief-stricken relative tells us we are ghouls and makes us think worse of ourselves. Now there is no need for that awkward speech of introduction. The door is wide open and a friendly figure is beckoning: “Come in, come in. Make yourself at home. I don’t know if any of it is any use to you, but you will find lots of pictures and some last words and several tributes from friends. Just help yourself.”