Dr Peter Coe has given talks on his book, Media Freedom in the Age of Citizen Journalism, at the University Cambridge’s Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law, and at the University of Essex’s TechLaw Research Cluster. The official launch of his book will take place virtually at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies’ Information Law and Policy Centre, University of London, on the 11^th of May at 9am. As it is a panel session, Peter will be joined by Professor Paul Wragg and Rebecca Moosavian from the University of Leeds, Professor David Rolph from the University of Sydney, Professor Andras Koltay, who is the President of the Hungarian Communication and Media Authority, and Lexie Kirkconnell-Kawana, who is Head of Regulation of IMPRESS. For further details on the event, and on how to register, see: ILPC Seminar Series: Media Freedom in the Age of Citizen Journalism Book Launch | IALS (sas.ac.uk)

Dr Peter Coe has been appointed by the Council of Europe as an independent member of the Council’s Expert Committee on Strategic Lawsuits against Public Participation.

In this book, Peter interrogates how the internet and social media have enabled citizen journalism to flourish, and what this means for the traditional institutional press, the public sphere, media freedom, and press regulation. He argues that the law’s treatment of media freedom as a concept needs to be modernised, as citizen journalists are operating as media, but are not recognised as such. To facilitate this modernisation, he advances a new functional definition of the media that distinguishes media from non-media actors, and which provides a conceptual framework that recognises twenty-first century methods of newsgathering and publication. In doing so, he deals with some of the legal challenges this creates, including those arising from anonymous and pseudonymous speech, contempt of court, defamation, and how voluntary self-regulatory press regulation might be ‘reimagined’ to attract this new breed of journalist.