I’ve just got back from the first session of the Leveson Inquiry seminars, designed to allow interested parties to debate the issues that will be at stake in the Inquiry itself and to give the Inquiry’s panellists an education (Index chief exec John Kampfner will be giving his submission next week).

There was a massive array of speakers, including pretty much every national newspaper editor in the country, and masses of contributions (after brief presentations, the rest of the day was Town-Hall style, with the Inquiry panellists Sir David Bell, Elinor Goodman and George Jones calling on contributions). A few key themes emerged:

–          Commercial pressures cannot be blamed for unethical practice. Journalists are competitive, newsrooms are competitive, editors are demanding – but these are newsroom cultures which are separate from commerce. Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger pointed out that the newspaper market is not a true market anyway – in that many titles (his own included) are essentially subsidised by proprietors or trusts.

–          There seems to be an odd belief at large that bloggers are not subject to the same legal impediments as newspapers. There was a lot of discussion of how if newspapers didn’t get stories, the stories would circulate online anyway. While say, the breaking of the Ryan Giggs injunction may seem a case in point, the fact is that in terms of what they publish, newspapers face the exact same laws as bloggers, Facebook users, tweeters etc. If something is libellous, it is libellous. If something is in contempt of court, it is in contempt of court.

–          Everyone’s still struggling with how to get the web to pay. Media analyst Claire Enders told the room that £1 billion has been knocked off regional newspaper classified revenue since 2008. Alun Edwards, editor of the Western Mail, suggested that targeted online behavioural advertising might help replace this.

–          Encouragingly, the morning session didn’t turn into qualities vs tabloids. Though former Daily Star hack Richard Peppiat painted a grim picture of the tabloid newsroom, most were keen to stress that as the Mail on Sunday’s Peter Wright pointed, “It is not intrinsically better to write about the crisis in the Eurozone than it is to write about last night’s big football match.” Steven Barnett of Westminster University expanded on this, saying we should “not confuse news values and news gathering techniques”.

The seminars continue this afternoon and on 12 October