Up-to-the-minute coverage of the year’s biggest media industry gathering as editors debate the future of UK journalism.

10.45.   The conference, and the blog, has now closed.  

10. 37.  “Phone hacking was a failure of the law, not of self-regulation, but self-regulation has to be re-examined,” says Fran Unsworth.  A fair enough summary of the consensus view among editors in Runnymede here this week.

10.30.  The panel discussion, which focused mainly on digital and social media, is over and it is time for the concluding act of the conference – the inaugural speech of the incoming SoE president, BBC head of newsgathering Fran Unsworth.

10.20. Another bon mot from Jim Chisholm:  “Citizen journalism is an oxymoron.  Just because a citizen communicates does not mean they are a journalist.”

10.15.  Doug Wills of the Evening Standard questions Northcliffe’s Steve Auckland over his company’s current policy of keeping print and online teams separate.    Steve responds:  “There’s a time and a place.  At this time we feel it’s the way forward, to give it that focus.  Otherwise my worry is that it gets dissipated.  I am not saying it will stay that way forever.  We will change over time.  At the moment I want to keep that focus.”

10.05.  South Wales Argus editor Gerry Keighley asks whether Jim’s survey reveals how much digital revenue is unique to the web and how much of it is attached to the print product.   Jim replies:  “I don’t know.”

10.01.  Barrie Jones of NWN Media says regional newspapers have “invested hugely in online journalism and creativity.

9.58.  Following on from Jim Chisholm’s comment about the impossibility of media regulation in an internet age, Guardian reader’s editor Chris Elliot says:  “Who is going to regulate Guido Fawkes?”

9.56. Peter Barron of Google says:”We’ve got to get away from the idea that social media = drivel.”

9.47.  We move into a panel discussion, Northcliffe managing director Steve Auckland talking about using different models in different centres, both in print and online.

9.44.  Jim Chisholm says the growth of the internet will render yesterday’s discussion about regulating the industry completely pointless.  “All that stuff yesterday about regulation has to be complete and utter rubbish.  (John) Whittingdale didn’t mention the internet once.  He’s from the Planet Zog.”

Tuesday 9.30.  The conference reopens with a presentation by Jim Chisholm on the results of the SoE survey on editors’ attitudes.  Key findings include the fact that editorial headcounts have fallen by 29pc since 2007.   In terms of volume of material produced, traditional print output has fallen by 17pc, but digital output has increased by 163pc.

4.56. The conference adjourns for the day.  The annual gala dinner takes place tonight with Attorney General Dominic Grieve as the guest speaker.  The debate resumes tomorrow morning at 9.30am with the 20/20 Vision session looking at the future shape of the industry.

4. 53. Lord Hunt announces he will visit the Liverpool Daily Post, Liverpool Echo and Manchester Evening News this week to talk about the future of the PCC.    He says:  “I know I will find evidence to support our case.”

4.51.  For the second time in the day, South Wales Argus editor Gerry Keighley  weighs in in defence of the PCC, citing inquest reporting as an example.  “I think the PCC has done a great job over past 20 years.  The way the regional press treats inquest reports is completely transformed and that’s largely due to the Code and to PCC rulings.”

4.48.  Neil Fowler is angered by Helen Goodman’s contribution:  “What we’ve heard from Heleh Goodman shows that the fight is not over.  If that’s the point of view from the Parliamentary Labour Party an awful lot of lobbying has to take place.”

4.37.  Lord Hunt agrees it would be an option to retain the PCC as a complaints handling service alongside another body which does the regulation.

4.33.  Shadow media minister Helen Goodman takes issue with the growing consensus in favour of retaining the PCC in some form, saying it had “patently not done a marvellous job” during the phone hacking affair.

4.24.  Lord Black says no-one has made a case for statutory controls.    There is “substantial unanimity of view” that the PCC’s complaints handling service is a very good service.    However he accepts that no change is not an option.

4.22.  Lord Hunt says the current Editor’s Code of Practice is a “pretty perfect code,” but he says he wants to give further thought to how the “public interest” is defined.

4. 17.  The PCC tried to do something about phone hacking but did not have the power, Lord Hunt says.  It would have been “impossible” for the Commission to satisfy the demand for an investigation. 

4.16.  Lord Hunt says this is a “great opportunity” for the industry to come up with a new system of self-regulation.  He says the PCC has been “unfairly judged.”

4.14.  New PPC chairman Lord David Hunt takes the stage, together with Lord Guy Black, head of the watchdog’s funding body Pressbof.

3.33. Session three ‘Does anyone do it better?’ comes to a close with a summary by Professor Peter Cole from the University of Sheffield. 

 3.23.  Shadow media minister Helen Goodman asks:  “If you don’t want politicians interfering, why did you choose as the new chair of the PCC a former Tory minister who sits in the House of Lords?”  A reference to new PCC chair Lord Hunt who served in the cabinet under John Major.

3.04. Information Commissioner Christopher Graham, a former head of the Advertising Standards Authority, hits out at the ‘word in your ear’ system of regulation used by the PCC, saying that what the public wants and expects is “heads on poles.” He tells the editors:  “Where did the word in your ear approach get you?”

3.03. The debate is now focusing on models of regulation used by other industries, for instance advertising, financial services and the law, and whether these could be used for newspapers.

1.17.  Conference breaks for lunch.  The live blog will resume at 2.30pm.

1.09.  Richard Caseby of The Sun asks for a public interest defence to be introduced to the Bribery Act, which could potentially outlaw payments by newspapers to whistleblowers.  Mr Clarke says prosecutions would only be made under the Bribery Act where it was clearly in the public interest. 

1.o6.    The latest revelations in the Leveson Inquiry will reinforce the public’s view that there is a serious problem, says Mr Clarke.  “But if politicians seek to muzzle the press there will be a very strong public reaction to that as well.”

12. 53.  Mr Clarke says there are other things the press should address to regain public confidence, including contempt of court.  He cites the “appalling” case of the reporting of the arrest of Christopher Jeffries, landlord of murder victim  Jo Yeates, who was subsequently released without charge.

12.50.  “My instinct is self-regulation,” says Mr Clarke.  “God save us from another quango.  But if we are going to have self-regulation it must work.  It must have some power.  Its findings must have some impact and force.   It is not just a mediator, it provides a remedy.”

12.47.  “What we don’t want is a knee-jerk reaction.  Some politicians may want revenge on the press.  No serious politician would want to do that,” says Mr Clarke.

12.42.  Echoing John Whittingdale earlier, Mr Clarke draws a parallel between phone-hacking and the MPs expenses scandal, saying that although only a small number of MPs were fiddling their expenses, it would have been wrong for them to pretend there was not a problem. 

12.39.  “Any civilised society must have a totally free press….the press we want has got to be irreverent, critical, campaigning, annoying.   I don’t know any significant person who would not agree that a free press is absolutely essential to the kind of society we want” – Ken Clarke.

12.38.  Don’t underestimate the crisis of confidence in the press and other institutions, says Ken Clarke, but don’t get paranoid about it either. 

12.36. Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke is on his feet for the keynote address.

12.04.   John Kampfner suggests that newspapers which refuse to co-operate with a system of self-regulation should not be reviewed on TV news programmes. 

11.59.  From the floor, former editor Neil Fowler described the idea of statutory regulation as a “hammer” which will cause huge problems for the local and regional press.    Mr Whittingdale says he fully accepts that the regional press had nothing to do with phone-hacking, but draws a parellel with MPs who have had to accept much tighter regulations on their expenses as a result of the actions of a few.

11.50.  Richard Caseby of The Sun questions Charlotte Harris’s assertion that the public is “looking for a hanging” over the phone hacking scandal.  He says he sees no evidence of that.  She replies:  “People are quite angry about it you know.  I am not imagining it.”

11.44.  Barrister Hugh Tomlinson, of Matrix Chambers, says the idea of ‘PCC2′ is a complete non-starter.  “The idea of voluntary regulation without some kind of statutory backup strikes me as fantasy.”

11.37.  Both John  Whittingdale and Charlotte Harris believe the outcome of the Leveson Inquiry is likely to be statutory regulation of the press, despite the support of editors in the previous session for ‘PCC2.’  Mr Whittingdale says there is a “strong mood” in Parliament for statutory regulation.  Ms Harris says:  “If there is a PCC2 everybody will say the newspapers have got away with it.  We may end up with statutory regulation because nobody will accept anything less.”  She said that the public were “looking for a hanging.”

11.30.   The debate resumes with some new panellists, this time including Tory MP John Whittingdale, Index on Censorship’s John Kampfner, journalism professor George Brock, Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer and lawyer Charlotte Harris.

10.38.  The panellists sum up by listing the one thing they would change about the PCC.  Alan Rusbridger says it should have investigatory powers.  Neil Hodgkinson says it needs beefing up.  Chris Blackhurst says all newspapers should be required to be members of it.   Richard Wallace says he is “coming round to some sort of Ombudsman.”  James Harding says the best way of winning back public confidence is to go out and break important stories.

10.37.  Tim Luckhurst, former Scotsman editor now running the journalism course at the University of Kent, suggests we should be talking more about “ethics” and less about “rules.”

10.35.  Former Mirror political editor David Seymour is impressed by the Daily Mail’s new corrections column.

10.31.  John Bryant, a former national newspaper editor, says the concept of “regulation” is not compatible with that of a free press.  The Leveson Inquiry is “completely flawed,” he says.

10.24. Gerry Keighley, editor of the South Wales Argus, echoes last week’s comments by Neil Fowler in which he described phone-hacking as a distraction from the bigger economic issues facing the regional press industry.  “There is a strong case for separate regulation for the regional press and for the national press.  We have a completely different agenda.  Survival is our main issue at the moment, and, as Neil Fowler said, this is a distraction.”

10.21.  Southern Daily Echo editor Ian Murray says the fallout from the phone-hacking affair is already affecting relations between regional journalists and local police forces:  “I am very concerned that the fallout from this is going to be very damaging for us.  I have no doubt that our relationship with Hampshire Police will disappear further behind the wall of their very large media department,” he says.

10.13.  John Kampfner from Index on Censorship asks the panel why other newspapers ignored the phone-hacking story when The Guardian first broke it several years ago.  Mirror editor Richard Wallace says it was because it was a “meejah story.”  James Harding of The Times says it was partly because the police had said there was “nothing to see here.”

10.04.  From the floor, Newsquest London managing editor Anthony Longden echoes Neil Hodgkinson’s earlier comments on the PCC, saying that Prime Minister David Cameron was “shooting from the hip” when he described it as a failed organisation.

9.51.   James Harding, editor of The Times, says the PCC “does not have the confidence of the public or the press” but says there is a risk of putting in place systems that provide a “real obstacle” to freedom of expression.

9.44.  Chris Blackhurst, editor of the Independent, says he found some of the relationships between politicians and News International “weird.”  He recounts an occasion when the Labour cabinet minister Tessa Jowell entered a room arm in arm with Elizabeth Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks.

9.31.  Neil Hodgkinson, editor of the Hull Daily Mail, launches a defence of the Press Complaints Commission saying it has always worked well for the regional press. “We do take the PCC seriously….We have no problem with the PCC. From a regional point of view it has always worked well for us.”

9.20.   Mirror editor Richard Wallace:  “I don’t believe the public believes the press is broken.”

9.15.  Media pundit Steve Hewlett introduces the panel for the first session of the debate which includes Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, Daily Mirror editor Richard Wallace and Hull Daily Mail editor Neil Hodgkinson.

9.10.  SoE president Robin Esser opens today’s session with an attack on Prime Minister David Cameron.   “Many editors in this country have been extremely disappointed by the Prime Minister’s smears about the media industry as a whole and his utterly ill-founded condemnation of the PCC and self-regulation,” he says.   “They have been equally disappointed that he launched a judicial inquiry, at great expense to the taxpayer and to our industry, and then pre-judged the issue by effectively trying to condemn the PCC to death.”

9.00. Welcome to our 2011 Society of Editors’ conference live blog. Here we’ll be providing up-to-the-minute coverage of the year’s biggest industry gathering, being held at the Runnymede-on-Thames Hotel, Egham.

Last night the conference opened with the annual Society of Editors’ Lecture, this year delivered by the former Conservative cabinet minister and current BBC chairman, Lord Patten. Today editors are staging an all-day debate on the future of UK journalism entitled ‘A Press fit for the public.’

Regional press figures taking part in the debate include Trinity Mirror Regionals editorial director Neil Benson, Oxford Mail editor Simon O’Neill, Southern Daily Echo editor Ian Murray and South Wales Argus editor Gerry Keighley. There will also be a keynote speech from the Justice Secretary, Kenneth Clarke.

We’ll be covering all the speeches and developments as they happen so check back here for regular updates.