Impress, the alternative press regulator, is about to get its act together. It will announce on Wednesday (20 January) the identities of its first “clients”, the publishers that have agreed to be regulated by it.
At the same time, the body’s chair, Walter Merricks, will announce the timing of Impress’s application to the Press Recognition Panel (PRP).
He will reveal the details before giving a speech at the London School of Economics on the future of press regulation.
Impress has also recruited two new members for its board: Martin Hickman is the former deputy news editor of the Independent and the Press Association’s Westminster correspondent. He is co-author (with Tom Watson) of a book about the phone-hacking scandal, Dial M for Murdoch, and now runs a publishing company.
Emma Jones is a former Sun columnist, deputy editor of the paper’s Bizarre column at the Sun, and a news and features writer at the Sunday Mirror.
Impress is entirely independent of the publishing industry and is the alternative to the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso), which is funded by newspaper and magazine publishers.
Ipso regards signing up to the PRP, which was set up following parliament’s creation of the royal charter on press regulation, as a threat to press freedom.
Impress believes that there is no such threat and that publishers who come under the PRP’s umbrella will enjoy certain legal protections.
At present, three major publisher of national titles - the Guardian, Independent and Financial Times - have not signed up to regulation by either Ipso or Impress.
However, journalists at all three, as well as their Sunday stablemates and the London Evening Standard, abide by the editors’ code of practice.
