Intellectual Property Law

C-Span, the cable network that broadcasts governmental proceedings, press conferences, and call-in shows with issue experts and authors, is every outside-the-Beltway policy geek's favorite resource.

Now the McClatchy newspaper group is bringing an experimental kind of online audio C-Span experience to the citizens of the world through the web. The group's Washington DC bureau  has started to post  MP3s of  presidential campaign conference calls online.

McClatchy's online division started recording the calls in the run-up to the March 4 primaries "when these conference calls seemed to be proliferating at a rapid pace," says Mark Seibel, McClatchy's Washington bureau's online managing editor.

"We decided to post the campaign conference calls for our readers to listen to if they choose in the interest of maximizing transparency," says Robert Rankin, McClatchy's government and politics editor.

So far, interest in the online conference calls has been relatively low, they say. (Dave Winer has been the most high-profile and enthusiastic proponent of placing these calls online so far.)

Other news organizations have also experimented with placing the calls online. Ana Marie Cox of Time.com's politics blog Swampland posts full MP3s of the conference calls on the blog, and she occasionally solicits readers for questions to ask on those calls.  USA Today's politics blog, for its part, has posted snippets of the calls.

Asked what impact the posting of the conference calls has had on McClatchy reporters and their interactions with readers, Rankin says so far, not much.

"We do get suggestions for questions and stories from readers already, of course, and sometimes we act on them," Rankin writes in an e-mail. "So far that hasn't happened as a direct result of posting the audio of the conference calls, probably because the conference calls tend to be incredibly self-serving exercises in extended spin by the campaigns, and therefore off-putting to all but the most politics-obsessed voters. But there are those folks out there, of course, and now they have more to work with."

There's no regular schedule for the conference calls -- reporters can receive notifications of the calls just seconds before they happen. Seibel says that McClatchy tries to post them onto the web as soon as they're finished.

He notes that conference calls have played a bigger role in this presidential race than in any other previous campaign. The practical impact of this for the campaigns, he says, is that the sultans of spin can now reach out and spread their messages to more far-flung locales because reporters from local papers in small towns can now just dial in to question the campaigns' top strategists.

One reason we may not have seen more recording and airing of these calls on the web may be because the law on recording phone calls can get complicated. Twelve states require the consent of all parties before a conversation can be recorded, according to this guide from the Reporters Committee For The Freedom Of The Press.

"We don't think it's necessary to inform everyone on the call that we're recording," says Seibel. "The District of Columbia, where we're located, requires only that one party in a phone call know it's being recorded."

This may be yet another situation where the technology has enabled another development that the law didn't anticipate.

Image: Craig1Black