Further to the story about Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg urging the prime minister to create a press regulator with statutory underpinning, here's a little more detail about the latest Lords manoeuvre.
The cross-bench peer, Lord Skidelsky, has done a Puttnam - meaning that he has tabled amendments to the enterprise and regulatory reform bill for its report stage on 18 March. This bill has nothing to do with the media per se.
The Skidelsky reforms introduce a form of statutory arbitration under the current Arbitration Act and the creation of a recognition commission to oversee the new voluntary press regulator.
If it was deemed the regulator was failing in some way, it would start a sequence of events that could lead to a mandatory rather than voluntary regulator. Failure is defined as including a refusal of a large newspaper group to join the system of regulation.
The amendment states that the recognition commission "must send a report to the secretary of state and to the Speaker of the House of Commons drawing their attention to the fact that the system of regulation is not sufficiently effective."
A set of so-called "trigger events" to prove ineffectiveness are listed in the amendment. They include the failure of any "significant news publisher" to sign up to regulation.
In other words, should any major publisher stand outside the system of voluntary regulation, then it would be open to parliament to introduce statutory regulation.
The same would be true should a publisher who originally signed up later dropped out for a period of six months.
The amendment defines "significant" as a publisher that "has a weekly readership which would place it within the first 20 of a list of news publishers ranked in descending order of weekly readership."
This would obviously include every national newspaper publisher and all of the major regional publishers.
Skidelsky's amendment states that the minister would be required, within three months of receiving a negative report from the recognition commission, to regulate.
It is also noticeable that there is a total absence of any mention of digital media. As one media commentator said of amendment: "It is almost as if the internet did not exist."
*This posting has been amended. It originally said that "should any major publisher stand outside the system of voluntary regulation, then mandatory, statutory regulation would kick in". That was an an inaccurate interpretation of the amendment, for which I apologise.
