Constitutional Law

Court Dismisses Libel Lawsuit Against iBrattleboro

Posted on March 20, 2008
In a case we've been following closely at the Citizen Media Law Project, a Vermont judge has dismissed the libel lawsuit filed against Chris Grotke and Lise LePage, co-founders and owners of iBrattleboro.com, a widely acclaimed community journalism site based in Brattleboro, Vermont, ruling that Grotke and LePage are immune from liability under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act ("CDA 230")...

Nuestra ciudad, nuestras voces

Posted on March 20, 2008
Versión en español más abajo. Greetings all, for some time now we have been deeply involved in developing our project and carrying out the audiovisual production workshops with the immigrant population in Philadelphia. The workshops have had a good turnout, and as you may know already from my colleague Todd Wolfson, the first 20 participants finished the course successfully and are now in the process of making their videos...

How About an Annual Chris O'Brien New Media Business Model Award!

Posted on March 20, 2008
Returning to Chris O'Brien's Business Model Challenge, here are some suggested approaches and models from the perspective of an entrepreneur and strategic consultant. For a more rigorous approach I would absolutely check out Chris's recommended NewspaperNext report...

Virtually and Really Watching the Trees (grow)

Posted on March 20, 2008
The city of Shanghai is geo-tagging over 1500 registered ancient tress with the plan to use gps devices to monitor and protect the trees in ways they couldn't before. Not unlike many cities, modernization poses enormous risks (and has exacted quite a toll) to nature and the natural...

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It's Sunshine Week!

Posted on March 20, 2008
(Written by Tuna Chatterjee, CMLP Staff Attorney.) It's March and it's Sunshine Week. This year, from March 16 - 22, the American Society of Newspaper Editors is holding its annual initiative to raise public consciousness on the need for open government...

What Good is All This Data?

Posted on March 19, 2008
Imagine a website that would show you, not just how many copies of some book are available for sale from Amazon, but which libraries near you carry the book. Oh wait, that already exists . Between WorldCat and Steven's thoughts on the Sacramento Bee salary database I'm thinking a lot about what really good data driven content looks like...

No returning to the all-elites era

Posted on March 19, 2008
In response to this week's Newsweek article Revenge of the Experts suggesting the expert is back and user-created content is on the wane, columnist Tom Regan offers this in today's Christian Science Monitor: Credible Web? It's where we click most. Expertise is essential online, but the Internet's real 'killer app' is choice...

Is Citizen Media Skipping Small Town America?

Posted on March 19, 2008
I am on a hunt. While the new EveryBlock.com site uses maps to display aggregated content for three major cities and Outside.in gets local with select geotagging blogs in a number of high population areas, I am looking for tools that display organic "user-generated" content via maps that get out of urban areas and into small town America...

Markets Fail News

Posted on March 18, 2008
Thanks to Chris O'Brien's challenge, serious talk of business models for journalism have come to the IdeaLab blog. Let's pause a moment for an overarching view. Turn off the bright lights and stare into the empty studio. Markets - selling and buying at prices set by supply and demand - don't work for news and information...

Is posting public employee salaries online a good thing?

Posted on March 18, 2008
Government Technology reported on public employee protests to seeing their names and salaries online via a database on the Sacramento Bee. What about public employee salaries - should all be publicly posted online? Should only management level and above be listed specifically with others displaying the salary range per pay scales for various classifications? I have a hard time imagining a democracy where any and all legally public government information is not on the Internet for all to see in a decade or so...

The State of the News Media Is Troubled

Posted on March 18, 2008
On Monday the Project for Excellence in Journalism released its annual State of the News Media report. It's worthwhile reading for anyone who's interested in the major trends affecting not just the news industry but the culture of information dissemination in this country...

Playing the News

Posted on March 17, 2008
For those of us working on creating "serious games," the experience we've had with the "Playing the News" project might be instructive. We are working with the Johnson Simulation Center at Pine Technical College in Pine City, MN to develop a tool that will allow journalists (read, non-techies) create engaging games built from news coverage of ongoing coverage in a community...

Fragmentation of Media is Democratization of Media: Retaining Reach

Posted on March 17, 2008
Oso uses a German pilot's statement that he would not have shot down the author of the Little Prince, had he known, to ask: Will Global Voices' coverage of Iranian bloggers have any influence one way or the other on a potential US invasion? It is comforting to think that it could, but realistically, I doubt it...

Gaming, seriously.

Posted on March 14, 2008
I crossed paths with "serious gaming," in a serious way twice in one week. First at the Knight Digital Media Center's Editorial Writers seminar in Los Angeles last week. Later in the week, I attended a gaming session at the Computer Using Educator's conference in Palm Springs...

Is that my corpse they're talking about?

Posted on March 13, 2008
I've been following closely a theme that has developed here in recent days. It began last week with David Sasaki's post about the legacy of the Knight family, continued with Dan Gillmor's call for more entrepreneurial thinking in journalism, and was amplified by J...

A News Mashup

Posted on March 13, 2008
The good folks at Netsquared in San Francisco are sponsoring a Mashup Challenge, designed to encourage civil society and social benefit organizations to submit innovative new ideas for Mashups(web_application_hybrid) supporting social change. Of the 50 or so entries submitted so far, a number of them have a news angle that may be of interest to journalists and the larger media community...

Boulder's ClimateSmart Lacks Online Community

Posted on March 12, 2008
When I,Reporter launched Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker last summer, we knew from meetings with Boulder city officials that they were planning their own web site to promote the city's unique greenhouse gas reduction initiative. Not only didn't that stop us, it encouraged us...

The San Jose Mercury News and Gary Webb

Posted on March 11, 2008
The San Jose Mercury News' location in Silicon Valley is not the first reason it should have become the newspaper of record in the Internet age. Reading about this year's round of layoffs and cutbacks, I think about the journalist the Mercury News cut off twelve years ago during boom times...

CMLP Legal Guide: Newsgathering and Privacy

Posted on March 10, 2008
This is the fourth in a series of posts I've written that call attention to some of the topics covered in the Citizen Media Legal Guide the Citizen Media Law Project began publishing in January. This past month we rolled out the sections on Newsgathering and Privacy, which address the legal and practical issues both professional and non-professional journalists may encounter as they gather documents, take photographs or video, and collect other information...

Newspapers: The Innovation Challenge

Posted on March 09, 2008
On Friday Dan Gillmor wrote here about bringing an entrepreneurial mindset to today's journalism. On Friday, Dan's former employer, the San Jose Mercury News, laid off 15 newsroom staffers and lost five other editors through buyouts, shaving the editorial staff by about 10 percent, on top of a larger set of layoffs a few months ago...

Bringing Entrepreneurial Thinking to Journalism

Posted on March 07, 2008
(Note: I wrote this initially for PR Week magazine. What follows is slightly updated.) A cliche of business holds that good ideas are a dime a dozen; it's hard work and investment capital that turn them into businesses. As with most cliches, this one has a solid foundation of truth...

Knight Ridder and the Knight Foundation: Two Legacies, Two Paths

Posted on March 05, 2008
This is a story about who foots my paycheck. It is a story about who funds this very blog, along with all of the projects that we write about here. It is the story of the transformation of media and the efforts to make that transformation sustainable...

Hyperlocal media's threat to personal privacy minuscule compared to big media

Posted on March 04, 2008
Hyperlocal media's threat to personal privacy minuscule compared to big media Chances are you'll be getting a notice regarding changes in privacy policies from the various web sites from hgtv.com (Home and Garden) to myspace and other publishers and advertising related businesses associated with the Internet Advertising Bureau...

Citizen Media Law Project Publishes Newsgathering Legal Guide

Posted on March 03, 2008
Back in January, I announced the launch of the first two major sections of the Citizen Media Law Project's Legal Guide covering Forming a Business and Getting Online and Dealing with Online Legal Risks. This past month we began rolling out the section on Newsgathering and Privacy, which addresses the legal and practical issues you may encounter as you gather documents, take photographs or video, and collect other information...

Is It a Game Without Moving Parts?

Posted on March 03, 2008
We're knee deep in our second game and I realized that I never came through with my promised recap of our last minute technical decisions on the Garbage Game. For one thing, as I mentioned, we jumped ship from OpenLaszlo in the interest of expedience...

Is Old Media Really Dead?

Posted on March 02, 2008
According to this new report released by We Media/Zogby, two thirds of Americans think traditional journalism is out of touch with what they want from their news and nearly half now get their news online. The report suggests that 29% of Americans get their primary news information fromTelevision, 11% from radio and only 10% from newspapers...

National Awareness Days are a Cry for Help

Posted on March 01, 2008
Today, March first, is National Self-Injury Awareness Day. You may not know much about this issue. A Google news search turned up one article, in the independent Charleston Gazette. I am meaningfully aware that people self-injure only through a friend's yearly blog post to mark self-injury awareness day: "We are male and female...

Community Organization with Digital Tools

Posted on March 01, 2008
Last week I took a digital-communication-oriented glance at the war on Scientology being led by the nontraditional online group called Anonymous. I'm not exactly writing a part 2, but I want to start a follow-up discussion on a few of the comments made and questions posed by Anonymous about how digital media affects the dynamics of community organization...

The Catch Is the "Challenge" Part

Posted on February 29, 2008
Earlier this week I was at WeMedia 08 in Miami, where I was on a panel about the Knight News Challenge. (Last year, Adam Glenn and I won a Knight News Challenge grant to fund our community journalism project, the Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker.) Also on the panel were Gary Kebbel, director of the News Challenge progam for the John S...

Media Organizations Back Wikileaks in Court

Posted on February 27, 2008
Yesterday, a coalition of organizations dedicated to preserving free speech rights on the Internet, including the Citizen Media Law Project, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Los Angeles Times, Hearst Corp., Gannett Co., Associated Press, and Society of Professional Journalists, filed a "friend of the court" brief in the Wikileaks case...

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