Idea Lab

After Crystal Cox Verdict, It's Time to Define Who Is a Journalist

by CJ Cornell
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last month, the Crystal Cox verdict re-energized a debate among journalism's most passionate and articulate thought leaders and professionals by begging the question: Who is a journalist? Just about anyone with a laptop or cell phone can use free technology to create quality media and reach audiences larger than any newspaper or television network. Indeed, we are all publishers now. But are we all journalists now, too? Never has technology unraveled an industry so fast that its professionals no longer agree on what it is that they do. It's not surprising; the sharp line between journalist and non-journalist is so faded that few...

• January 31, 2012
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The Front Line of the U.S. Censorship Battle Is Behind Bars

by Matt Stempeck
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

A longer version of this post first appeared on MIT's Center for Civic Media blog. In our ongoing quest to trace the outline of the phrase "civic media," we began the Center for Civic Media's 2012 lunch series with Paul Wright, editor and co-founder of Prison Legal News, and executive director of the Human Rights Defense Center, the non-profit umbrella which publishes PLN. PLN operates in a unique media environment, where the very act of distributing a magazine to their customers might first require winning a lawsuit. You see, their primary audience is made up of prisoners themselves. Prison Legal...

• January 27, 2012
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OpenCourt Coaxes Out More Data with Cooperative Coverage Day

by Joe Spurr
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

A version of this post first appeared on the OpenCourt blog. A man charged with selling drugs inside the courthouse. A woman said to have shoplifted $5 worth of barbeque chicken wings. A man charged with multiple counts of raping a child with force. A longtime Drug Court participant booted from the program for taking a non-narcotic pill (still against the rules). Everyone brought back to court owing fees or victim restitution in previously dismissed cases. A man on psychotropic medication charged with shoplifting a Stop and Shop cart full of meat and pulling a knife when confronted in the...

• January 18, 2012
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Why Unions Should Not Support SOPA

by Matt Stempeck
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

A version of this post first appeared on the MIT Center for Civic Media blog. I was supposed to speak on a panel about SOPA recently with the Northeast chapters of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. It was to serve as an educational discussion for local members, but at the national level, both unions have already officially endorsed SOPA. I spent the weekend preparing remarks, but the panel has been postponed, or possibly canceled, on account of AFTRA and SAG failing to provide representatives to discuss the bill. I can only hope...

• January 13, 2012
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#DontBreakTheInternet: How The Web Became a Political Force vs. SOPA

by Matt Stempeck
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Good ideas aren't enough. They need champions and constant vigilance, or Congress will take them from you. Many problems arise when your country's legislature is consistently more responsive to its donors than its constituents. One of these problems is that simple good ideas can't just be left alone to bask in their goodness. The Internet is clearly a good idea -- not tautologically good, but certainly one of the better things that's happened to human communication and the spread of knowledge in recent centuries. But now some people in Congress who didn't know what an MP3 was until their granddaughter...

• November 21, 2011
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OpenCourt Goes Back to High School

by Val Wang
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

While the live-stream of Quincy District Court is the cornerstone of our project to open the court through digital technology, OpenCourt is in the process of expanding. One of our hopes is that the project will be used as a resource for high school civics classes. I asked one high school social studies teacher we got in touch with, Jack Buckley at nearby Cohasset High School in Cohasset, Mass., how he would use OpenCourt in his classes. He teaches an elective called "Intro to Law" that he says is like a traditional civics class -- save for the fact that...

• November 9, 2011
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'The State Decoded' Squeezes Rich Metadata Out of Boring Legal Codes

by Waldo Jaquith
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

At first blush, state legal codes seem pretty simple. You've got titles, which are composed of chapters, which in turn comprise sections -- or something very much like that. It's a straightforward hierarchy, and you might not think that there's a lot of interesting metadata to be extracted from them. But it turns out that a rich mesh of metadata lies just beneath the surface, and by mining that metadata, The State Decoded, a 2011 Knight News Challenge project, is creating an innovative method of navigating state codes. Here are a few of the most interesting sources of metadata that...

• September 6, 2011
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The State Decoded Aims to Make State Laws Accessible

by Waldo Jaquith
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

State laws are written for and by attorneys. While that might make for a good legal system, it sure makes them hard for regular people to understand. There's code law -- what law books are full of -- and then there's case law, which is how the laws are actually interpreted by courts. Every time each state's legislature meets, they propose thousands of bills that would amend those laws. Attorney generals routinely write opinions about how laws should be interpreted. Law journals publish long articles exploring what laws mean. All of these sources and others still are more than many...

• August 12, 2011
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EuroSay.eu Gives Latvians a Voice in Legislation

by Kristofs Blaus
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

EuroSay.eu, a social initiative framework similar to Avaaz.org and Change.org, aims to let people bring their ideas into the agenda initiatives for parliaments or state institutions. It was launched in Latvia at the start of July. It stands out with its user-friendly interface and integrated functionality for all involved parties -- the users, administrators and the target group (decision makers). Three days after its launch, Valdis Zatlers, Latvia's outgoing president, made a public appeal to use Manabalss.lv. Within a week, Saeima, the parliament of Latvia, decided to vote on the first of Manabalss.lv initiatives, and it was adopted in the...

• August 4, 2011
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OpenCourt's Balancing Act: Redacting Sensitive Info vs. First Amendment

by Joe Spurr
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

OpenCourt, our Knight Foundation-funded project devised to help make courts more transparent, is facing a legal challenge soon to be heard by a judge in the highest court in Massachusetts. The central issue at stake is a First Amendment question of whether the court can order a news organization to redact material that has been presented to the public in an open courtroom. On July 8, WBUR, a public radio station, filed a response memo as well as a supplemental affidavit of our executive producer to the state's Supreme Judicial Court. The documents are the latest in a lengthy legal...

• July 19, 2011
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Highs and Lows of OpenCourt: Live-Streaming, Tweeting from Court

by Val Wang
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Launches are by definition difficult. To get from zero to full speed ahead is always a bumpy process. The launch of OpenCourt was no different. Little did we know that in our first fortnight, we would be dealing with a D.A. that wanted to shut down our archive, sore backs from working out of a tiny witness box, and a week of multiple escape attempts that even veteran court staff told us was rare. The lesson for us is that when launching a pilot project, expect the unexpected and be sure to have a foundation in place to help...

• June 3, 2011
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Why We Won't Live-Stream Restraining Order Hearings

by Val Wang
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the first questions people ask when I tell them about our project, Order in the Court 2.0, to live-stream court proceedings is, "Is there a way to turn the camera off?" They must imagine a camera bolted to the wall, gobbling up images of domestic violence victims and child sex offenders with no regard to how it affects justice being served. But I have the opposite fear too -- that the judges in those courtrooms will become so skittish that they'll keep turning the camera off and we'll lose the ideal of openness that is the purpose of...

• March 10, 2011
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Lawyers Voice Concerns About Live-Streaming Court Cases

by Val Wang
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the first things First Justice Mark Coven told us when we went down to the Quincy District Court to start talking about our project, Order in the Court 2.0, was that we had to hold an all-court meeting to introduce the project to everyone to get their input. This seemed like an excellent thing to do before waltzing into the complex world of the court with our video camera and high-speed Internet in hand. On the day of the meeting in December, the First Session of the courthouse was standing room only, and included the entire court staff,...

• February 4, 2011
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Massachusetts to Allow Live Twittering, Blogging in Courts

by John Davidow
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

A big step forward took place this week for Order in the Court 2.0. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court announced a major proposal to change the state's "Cameras in the Courtroom statute", SJC Rule 1:19. Everything you'd want to know about the change is reflected in the name of the new rule. It's now called "Electronic Access to the Courts." The current "cameras in the courtroom" statute applied to what are now considered mainstream media. Media with prior notification to the court were allowed to record audio, video and still images from the courts. The statute allows for one still...

• December 10, 2010
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MIT Unveils Civic Tools for Communities Affected by Natural Gas

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last Friday, MIT Center for Future Civic Media's director Chris Csikszentmihalyi formally released extrAct, a suite of Internet-based databasing, mapping and communications technologies for use by communities impacted by natural gas development. extrAct is targeted not only at communities and landowners but also at the journalists who cover local development and environment issues. It is a novel platform for community education and civic action. While outlets such as 60 Minutes have picked up on both the unprecedented opportunities and health risks of American natural gas extraction, which is touted as the country's path to energy independence, Csikszentmihályi and his team...

• November 26, 2010
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Order In The Court 2.0 Adds Staff, Plans Live-Streams from Court

by John Davidow
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the last few weeks Order in the Court 2.0 has made enormous strides in moving forward with our project. Most importantly we've brought on board two very talented individuals who are responsible for the day-to-day operation of this project. Below is the note that I put out to the staff of WBUR, which is the home-base of this Knight News Challenge initiative. New Staff Joe Spurr and Val Wang are joining WBUR to work on our new online initiative, Order in the Court 2.0. Order in the Court 2.0 is a Knight News Challenge funded initiative that will explore...

• November 17, 2010
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MIT Project Helps Prisoners Blog From Jail Through Snail Mail

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Though we were the top winner in the inaugural Knight News Challenge back in 2007, MIT's Center for Future Civic Media took as our mandate something rather "un-news": Applying our tech expertise to information needs, broadly defined, rather than what we'd traditionally call news. This focus has had a big impact on the kind of work we take on. It's pushed us to identify key needs left unmet by traditional news outlets, even ones otherwise adjusting well to the transition online. We've worked on urban signage, open-source grassroots mapping, natural gas drilling databases, and much else with big, ground-level...

• November 4, 2010
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How is Privacy Protected with Transparency Coming to Courts?

by John Davidow
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Going into last week's meeting at Quincy District Court, Joan Kenney, the state court's chief public information officer and I had a quick phone meeting on what we were going to talk about at an upcoming meeting with Judge Andre A. Gelinas. Judge Gelinas, a retired justice who sat on the Massachusetts Appeals Court, now serves as the Special Advisor to the Chief Justice for Administration & Management for Information Technology. In short, Judge Gelinas was going to be a legal referee for Order in the Court 2.0 who will help us determine what the project could or should be...

• September 28, 2010
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Media Law Conference for Journalists, Bloggers and Other Digital Media

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Center for Sustainable Journalism at Kennesaw State University are co‐hosting a conference on September 25, 2010 in Atlanta entitled "Media Law in the Digital Age: The Rules Have Changed, Have You?" Designed for journalists, bloggers, and lawyers who work with media clients, the conference will be an opportunity to learn first‐hand the latest legal developments and to get your questions answered by experts in the field. The program will bring together legal practitioners, journalists, and academics to discuss the latest legal issues facing online media ventures. Topics will include: libel law, copyright law, newsgathering law,...

• September 21, 2010
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A Groundbreaking Survey of New Media and The Courts

by John Davidow
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Late last month the Conference of Court Public Information Officers released the results of a nearly year-long study entitled, New Media and the Courts - The Current Status and a Look at the Future. I have anxiously been awaiting this report. I believe it will play a major role as we outline the activity of Order in the Court 2.0. I first became aware of this study as I prepared my Knight News Challenge proposal. During the submission process, I consulted quite frequently with one of the co-authors of the CCPIO report, Chris Davey. Davey and I agreed that if...

• September 8, 2010
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Order in the Court 2.0: Making the Justice System More Public

by John Davidow
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

The idea behind Order in the Court 2.0, one of this year's winners of a Knight News Challenge grant, is to restore and reinvigorate the public's access and understanding of our nation's courts. Up to now journalism has been the primary bridge connecting the public to the courts. But the media's ability to cover the courts is diminished due to shrinking resources. At the same time, many in the public are equipped with new media tools like smartphones, Wi-Fi and access to multiple social networks. Working with the judiciary and the public, Order in the Court 2.0 will establish best...

• August 13, 2010
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Programming Language for Kids Banned from Apple App Store

by Andrew Whitacre
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The MIT News Office recently interviewed one of our colleagues at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, Mitch Resnick. Resnick is a long-time Media Lab professor best known for helping develop and deploy Scratch, a programming language for kids. But this month Apple rejected an app that would allow kids to view Scratch programs on iPhones and iPads. Resnick is his ever-reasonable self in the interview, saying that Apple doesn't allow applications that interpret or execute code and thus the Scratch app in question (which was developed by a third party) violates that policy. But it's an indication of...

• May 3, 2010
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Crowdsourcing Crime Information In Kenya

by Juliana Rotich
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Hatari.co.ke is is a website that allows anyone in Nairobi, Kenya, to submit reports about crime and corruption in the city. ("Hatari" means "danger" in Swahili.) It will provide the growing city and its inhabitants with a repository of public information about incidents such as carjacking, corruption, police harassment and others. This initiative builds on other crime maps such as SpotCrime and MapATL. The idea of crime mapping is not new (see EveryBlock, an Idea Lab success story), but it's unlikely that law enforcement officials and the general public in Kenya previously had a tool to visualize crime information. This...

• March 17, 2010
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Complying with the FTC Disclosure Requirements for Product Endorsements

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Back in October, the Federal Trade Commission published a set of "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."  The FTC Guidelines call for bloggers, Tweeters, Facebook users, and certain other online publishers to disclose any "material connections" they have with companies whose products or services they endorse.  The FTC Guidelines, which went into effect on December 1, 2009, also say that bloggers and other social media users may be held liable for making misleading or unsubstantiated claims about a product or service. Not surprisingly, the FTC Guidelines generated a bit of an uproar.  While some of...

• December 17, 2009
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Guide to Live-Blogging and Tweeting from Court

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As part of the Citizen Media Law Project's legal guide series on documenting public proceedings and events, today we published a guide to Live-Blogging and Tweeting from Court.  Over the past year, we've published guides addressing how to stay out of legal trouble while documenting activities at polling places and covering the Presidential Inauguration, as well as a series of videos on newsgathering and privacy. Today's installment in the series looks at the impact of new media on one of our most tradition-bound institutions: the courts. The question of who is a journalist - and by extension, what is journalism...

• December 10, 2009
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Citizen Media Law Project Gives Free Legal Help to Online Publishers

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I am delighted to announce the public launch of the Berkman Center's Online Media Legal Network (OMLN), a new pro bono initiative that connects lawyers and law school clinics from across the country with online journalists and digital media creators who need legal help. Lawyers participating in OMLN will provide qualifying online publishers with pro bono and reduced fee legal assistance on a broad range of legal issues, including business formation and governance, copyright licensing and fair use, employment and freelancer agreements, access to government information, pre-publication review of content, and representation in litigation. The idea for the network...

• November 19, 2009
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AP News Registry Aims at Most Flagrant Infringers

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I left the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Association Summit of newspaper publishers and ad managers Thursday just as two executives from the Associated Press were winding up their presentation on the new AP News Registry. The new initiative, announced in July, contains two key components: • All AP stories will be released online wrapped in a new microsoformat that includes rights info, who created it, etc. • The wrapper also will carry a built-in "digital beacon," or tracker, to monitor use of the content by others to track usage and compliance. (As I understand this, the content is not encrypted...

• September 21, 2009
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EveryBlock, MSNBC.com and the General Public License

by Amanda Hickman
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

By now everyone has heard the news: EveryBlock is now part of MSNBC.com. And anyone familiar with the Knight News Challenge knows about Knight's open source requirement: projects developed with Knight funding must be released under an open source license -- it is one of the terms of funding. EveryBlock released their source code a few months ago, but Biella Coleman posed an excellent question Since the code is under a GPL3, doesn't MSNBC.com have to also keep it under the same license if modified? Or can they take the code base since Everyblock is a web-based service? We at...

• August 18, 2009
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How Law Enforcement Overreached in Lori Drew Case

by Dan Gillmor
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When public officials start talking about "protecting the children," watch out. Those are often code words for whacking civil liberties -- and in the Internet age, they go directly to core liberties such as free speech. A breaking-news example is the ugly case of Lori Drew, in which a federal judge is in the process of rescuing us from a prosecutor whose legal theories would have created criminals of just about everyone who ever signed up for just about anything online. The judge said last week he's overturning a jury verdict that prosecutors won by abusing the law while appealing...

• July 7, 2009
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Cell Phone Video Makes the Difference in Oscar Grant case

by Dori J. Maynard
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the end, it may be the cell phone that makes the difference in Oscar Grant's death. Without it, it's likely that 22-year old father would have been just another anonymous black man who ended up dead after a run in with law enforcement. Instead, as Grant lay face down on the platform of a Bay Area Rapid Transit station, a handful of passengers pulled out their cell phones and hit record, capturing the moment that a BART officer shot him in the back, killing him. The graphic footage made its way around the world, sparking outrage. Two weeks later,...

• June 5, 2009
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Journalism Graduates: It's Time to Reinvent Journalism

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Spring is upon us and with it comes commencement season at universities across the country (Harvard's 358th commencement is this Thursday, FYI). This is a tough time for graduates in almost every discipline, but especially so for journalism grads. At least that is the conventional wisdom. Which is why it is so refreshing to see a shift in perspective occurring (perhaps even, gasp, a paradigm shift?) at two of this country's preeminent journalism schools: the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. In commencement speeches last month, Nicholas Lemann and Barbara Ehrenreich both exhorted...

• June 2, 2009
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New Resource Devoted to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Citizen Media Law Project, which I direct, today launched a new page that aggregates everything on our site relating to section 230 of the Communications Decency Act ("Section 230"), the important federal statute that protects operators of websites and other interactive computer services from liability for publishing the statements of third-parties. We've also added some detailed background on Section 230, links to our legal guide materials, and feeds showing recent legal threats from our database, blog posts, and news from other websites. The page also has a list of outside resources and will soon host a compendium of...

• April 30, 2009
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CMLP Leads Amicus Effort Promoting Rights of Anonymous Speakers in Illinois

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In a case involving important First Amendment rights, the Citizen Media Law Project joined a number of media and advocacy organizations, including Gannett Co., Inc., Hearst Corporation, Illinois Press Association, Online News Association, Public Citizen, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and Tribune Company, in asking an Illinois appellate court to protect the rights of anonymous speakers online by imposing procedural safeguards before requiring that their identities be disclosed. The amicus coalition, represented by Harvard Law School's Cyberlaw Clinic, submitted a "friend of the court" brief yesterday in the case of Maxon v. Ottawa Publishing. The case is before the...

• March 25, 2009
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Second Implementation of the Open Media Project Complete

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Ten members of the Deproduction team traveled to Austin this month to implement the Open Media tools at the second of 6 Beta sites, ChannelAustin. We traveled down in two RV's and scheduled the visit to coincide with SXSW, where we hosted a core conversation as part of the interactive festival. Austin is the first of the large Access Stations that we've worked with in this Knight News Challenge project, and it presented a whole new slate of challenges in comparison with the comparatively simpler implementation at Urbana Public TV. The entire process was documented, and the new ChannelAustin dev...

• March 24, 2009
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The Community Radio Movement in India

by Aaditeshwar Seth
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

India has been quite a latecomer to this promising channel of people empowerment through community media. Until late 2006, only educational institutions were allowed to set up campus radio stations having a transmission range of 10-15km. The scope was only recently expanded to also include non-profit agencies, agricultural research institutes, and schools, to set up community radio stations that would involve local communities in the content production process. The progress has been steady since then, although arguably somewhat slow. As of now, there are four stations that are broadcasting, and around six stations that are in advanced stages of their...

• March 10, 2009
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Messages From Hot Places

by Lisa Williams
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Yesterday I got to go to the MIT Media Lab to sit in on a gathering of researchers and graduate students involved with the Center for Future Civic Media. It's hard not to get all fangirl when going to the Media Lab. I mean, I used to read about this place in issues of Wired back before they adopted rational typography! We all got brief presentations on three projects at different stages of development. One, Virtual Gaza, took eyewitness testimonies from people living in Gaza and overlaid them on a Google Virtual Earth layer. Another, called Between the Bars, was...

• February 27, 2009
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House Exploded? Try Software for Community Collective Action.

by Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've written before about the extrACT suite of software tools we have been developing at MIT: information and communication technologies that promote community collective action. We have started to introduce the first of these tools, Landman Report Card, to communities in Texas and Ohio that are being confronted by the impacts of natural gas extraction. The experiences that citizens are recording with it are as remarkable as they are heartbreaking. Residents out west, in some of the most scenic and (until recently) unspoiled parts of the US have called their regions a "national sacrifice zone" where their health, welfare, and...

• February 25, 2009
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The Sins of Princes...

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've been following the story of Prince's copyright battles for over a year, and found the latest development noteworthy enough to call attention to. My interest began with Prince and Universal targeting YouTube, fan sites, and housewives for a number of debatable copyright infringements in 2007. It got some good media attention at first, with ABC News doing a great piece in Oct. 2007. But although the attention on the subject has waned in the media, Prince and UMG have kept up their plight, and the latest fallout is the death of one of the oldest and most popular fan...

• February 5, 2009
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Legal Guide to Covering the 2009 Presidential Inauguration

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Heading to Washington, D.C., to attend the Presidential Inauguration? You're bringing your camera with you, right? Well it shouldn't come as any surprise that heightened security measures across the Washington area will affect where you can go, what you can bring with you, and what you can do to cover the inaugural events. In an effort to help the estimated two million people who are expected to attend some of the events, the Citizen Media Law Project just published a legal primer on attending and documenting the 2009 Presidential Inauguration. The 2009 Presidential Inauguration is actually a series of...

• January 13, 2009
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The Role of Citizen Media in Ensuring Fair Elections

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Yesterday, I read an article in the New York Times describing the fears some voters in Duval County, Florida have that their early votes will be lost and never counted. I found the article deeply disturbing. It wasn't because it surprised me that people fear their votes won't be counted (that fear has some precedent in Duval County, where 26,000 ballots were discarded in the 2000 election), but because it brought into focus for me the apprehensive feelings I've been having about the upcoming election. I have this nagging feeling that something . . . well, terrible . ....

• October 30, 2008
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The Includer
Episode 5
Hardship Letter

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Please think of him as your mother or father, or your grandmother or grandfather, who rely on your help to make sense of the mail they get, even more so when they are shocked, dismayed or confused. You are their shield, their sword, their justice, their advocate, their Includer. David and I share his hardship letter to Aurora Loan Services.

• October 18, 2008
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New Liability Insurance Program for Bloggers

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here is a simple, but often ignored, truth: if you publish online, whether it's a news article, blog post, podcast, video, or even a user comment, you open yourself up to potential legal liability. It doesn't matter whether you are a professional journalist, hockey-mom, or an obscure blogger, if you post it, you'll need to be prepared for the legal consequences. So how big are the legal risks? It depends on what you publish and how you go about doing so. If you publish a blog about cute cats, for example, your risks are going to be lower than...

• September 23, 2008
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None of Your Business Model

by Christopher Csikszentmihályi
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

"What's the business model?" It's a question I hear again and again at meetings and events. The existing model for newspapers is quickly unraveling, so we need a 'new new thing' to serve some of the vital functions that newspapers used to. Whatever that new new thing may be, it is supposed to have a business model: a business model is what separates the well-meaning amateur from the sustainable enterprise. It is vital for securing loans or venture capital. You can't be serious about sustaining a venture unless you have a plan for a business that will sustain that venture....

• August 10, 2008
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My Advice to Knight on Local Democracy Online

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Knight Foundation is beginning to make some waves in local democracy circles. And I am not just saying that because they fund this blog. Earlier this year they hosted a conference with community foundations on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, then they announced the Knight Center of Digital Excellence focused on universal access to the "digital town square," and most recently announced a commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy and $24 million in matching funds for community foundations (see my collection of online civic engagement resources for community foundations referenced in a...

• July 30, 2008
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CMLP Completes Launch of Online Guide to Media Law

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Today, we are launching the final sections of the Citizen Media Law Project's online guide to media law covering the risks associated with publishing online, including defamation and privacy law.  (You can read the press release here.)  The free online guide, which is intended for use by bloggers, website operators, and other citizen media creators, focuses on the legal issues that non-traditional and traditional journalists are likely to encounter as they gather information and publish their work online. The legal guide, which runs more than 575 pages, is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. It...

• July 29, 2008
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Can Bloggers Shape Health Care Policy?

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

M.D. Leaves Profession to Blog Last week one of the most emailed stories on the New York Times website was about a medical doctor who traded in his profession for a more lucrative one: blogging. No, Arnold Kim M.D. does not blog about kidney diagnosis, his specialty, but rather, rumors about future Apple products. His blog, MacRumors.com is listed as the second most valuable blog ($85 million) on the internet right behind Gawker Media and ahead of The Huffington Post, according to 24/7 Wall St., a financial news blog. But what if Arnold Kim M.D. did decide to blog about...

• July 29, 2008
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Hero Reports Website

by Ellen Hume
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

The "Hero Reports" website project turns the anti-terrorism "See Something, Say Something" campaign on its head, to visualize security as civic connectedness.

• July 17, 2008
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Revisiting Foreign Libel Law's Pernicious Impact on First Amendment Speech

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Back in April, I blogged over at the Citizen Media Law Project about New York's Libel Terrorism Protection Act, which bars the enforcement of foreign defamation judgments unless a New York court has found that the foreign court proceeding provided at least as much protection for freedom of speech and press in that case as would be provided by both the United States and New York Constitutions. "Libel terrorism" (a term I am not a big fan of) describes the practice of libel plaintiffs who pursue claims against American publishers in foreign courts that offer few, if any, of...

• July 15, 2008
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NYC Police Deny Press Passes to Online Reporters

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

The New York City Police department, which issues (or refuses to issue) press passes and identification cards, has denied credentials to at least three on-line reporters we know of, including Gotham Gazette city hall editor Courtney Gross. In some instances, the denial seems like out and out political retribution. Leonard Levitt, a former Newsday reporter who now writes the blog NYPD Confidential, lost his pass. Levitt has been a persistent police critic, dating back to his days in print. But once he moved on line, the city had an excuse to pull his credentials. The New York Civil Liberties Union...

• July 8, 2008
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AP Takes on Drudge Retort Over Copyright Use

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week, the Associated Press ("AP") sent a takedown request under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to Rogers Cadenhead, the founder of Drudge Retort, a liberal alternative to (and parody of) the well-known Drudge Report, demanding that he remove six user-submitted blog entries and one user comment on the site that contained quotations from AP articles. Today, the New York Times reported that AP was reconsidering its request while it creates a set of guidelines for bloggers and websites that excerpt AP material. The Drudge Retort is a community site similar to Digg and Reddit, allowing its users to...

• June 16, 2008
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Killing Trees and the Future of News Online

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Seth Godin on the news buiness versus the paper business: Jason wrote in to ask why I thought that the newspaper industry was in a Dip. In my book, I point out that with classified ads disappearing and the web thriving, the days of newspapers as we know them are clearly over. That shouldn't mean the industry is in trouble. In fact, there are more people reading more news every day than ever before--without the cost of printing and distributing a costly piece of newsprint every day. Happy days... But (many of) the people in the industry have built their...

• June 4, 2008
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Knight Announces News Challenge Winners

by Mark Glaser
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Hello from sunny Las Vegas! I am here for the E&P Interactive Media Conference at the Rio Hotel, but also to welcome the next round of winners in the Knight Foundation's 21st Century News Challenge. These folks will soon be blogging here on Idea Lab, and it's quite a group of winners. (To see the whole list of winners, go here, and for Knight's press release on the winners, check this out.) Knight Foundation CEO Alberto Ibarguen (pictured below) announced the winners at the conference this morning. I think the most exciting aspect of the next round of winners is...

• May 14, 2008
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Copyright and the Demise of Newspapers

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Neil Netanel, a highly regarded legal scholar, has an interesting post on Balkinization entitled "The Demise of Newspapers: Economics, Copyright, Free Speech." Netanel, who has written extensively on copyright issues, posits that part of the reason for the decline in newspapers stems from Internet competitors that build on the content and value that newspapers create. He suggests that imposing a statutory license or levy on commercial Internet service providers and news aggregators might be a workable solution for ensuring that newspapers receive compensation for their investment in quality reporting. While I think he gives too little credit to citizen...

• May 8, 2008
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How Do We Deal with Stolen Content?

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

In an ideal world, I suppose, all information would be free and widely accessible. Maybe not credit records, health stats or income information -- but certainly journalism would be. Alas, though, we're not in an ideal world. On-line publications need readers (hits) to survive. In the case of a small independent site like Gotham Gazette, we need hits to attract funders and advertisers and to build our reputation and credibility. And we need to maintain control over our material to preserve our integrity. So it was distressing when our technical director, Amanda Hickman, using Technorati, found many sites using our...

• May 1, 2008
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Judge Quashes Subpoena to Blogger Kathleen Seidel

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A federal magistrate judge in New Hampshire has quashed the subpoena issued to Kathleen Seidel. Seidel publishes the blog Neurodiversity, where she writes about autism issues. In February 2008, she wrote about a lawsuit against various vaccine manufacturers, Sykes v. Bayer, in which the plaintiffs Lisa and Seth Sykes seek to link exposure to mercury to their son's autism. (For more on her statements about the lawsuit, see my previous post: Blogger Kathleen Seidel Fights Subpoena Seeking Information About Vaccine Litigation.) On March 24, 2008, Clifford Shoemaker, an attorney for the Sykes, served Seidel with a subpoena in connection...

• April 23, 2008
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Blogger Kathleen Seidel Fights Subpoena Seeking Information About Vaccine Litigation

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

We've been following the subpoena issued to Kathleen Seidel in the Citizen Media Law Project's Legal Threats Database, but thought it was time to throw our support behind Seidel and post about this egregious attempt to chill online speech. Seidel publishes the blog Neurodiversity, where she writes about autism issues. In February 2008, she wrote about a lawsuit against various vaccine manufacturers, Sykes v. Bayer, in which the plaintiffs, Lisa and Seth Sykes, seek to link exposure to mercury to their son's autism. Seidel's post mainly focused on developments in the lawsuit, but some of her language was critical...

• April 11, 2008
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CMLP Legal Guide: Accessing Government Info

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Back in January, the Citizen Media Law Project began rolling out its Citizen Media Legal Guide. So far, we've published major sections of the guide covering Forming a Business and Getting Online, Dealing with Online Legal Risks, and Newsgathering and Privacy. This week we began rolling out the section on Access to Government Information, which highlights the extensive amount of information available through government sources and explains how both traditional and non-traditional journalists can use various public access laws to gather and make effective use of this information. To whet your appetite, I've pasted the first part of the...

• April 2, 2008
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Court Dismisses Libel Lawsuit Against iBrattleboro

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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"). The lawsuit, which was filed by Effie Mayhew on November 16, 2007, alleges that David Dunn, the former executive director of Rescue Inc., an emergency medical services organization where Mayhew works as a volunteer, libeled her in a...

• March 20, 2008
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It's Sunshine Week!

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

(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. The name "Sunshine Week" is derived from the late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis's admonition that "[s]unlight is the best disinfectant," describing his belief that an open government is more accountable to its people and thus less easily corrupted. As I write this post, various participants in the media community are similarly calling attention to the public's right to...

• March 20, 2008
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How Far Should Transparency Go?

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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. This means the ethics filings of public officials will be liberated from the dusty paper files...

• March 18, 2008
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CMLP Legal Guide: Newsgathering and Privacy

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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. In this post, I highlight the Gathering Private Information section of the legal guide, which outlines various privacy laws that set limits on the use of...

• March 10, 2008
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Dealing with Privacy Issues in Hyper-Local Media

by G. Patton Hughes
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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. These changes in privacy policies are the result of a new marketing approach endorsed by the Internet Advertising Bureau establishing tighter integration of data collected by media sites with databases of advertisers and others who serve ads to the public on the Internet. Members of the IAB are a who's who in the Internet industry including Google, Yahoo!, double-click, AOL, the NYTimes, Cox...

• March 4, 2008
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Citizen Media Law Project Publishes Newsgathering Legal Guide

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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. Here is a quick rundown of the sections we've just published: Entering the Property of Others discusses your rights to access public and private property and provides some guidance on...

• March 3, 2008
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Media Organizations Back Wikileaks in Court

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

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. If you haven't been following the case, a federal judge in San Francisco issued a stunningly broad injunction on February 15 that brought down Wikileaks.org, a site that is developing what it describes as an "uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis." True to its...

• February 27, 2008
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WikiLeaks Block Hurts Anonymity Everywhere

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Anonymous communication online is becoming quite a theme here on Idea Lab. The web site WikiLeaks.org (if you're in the United States, right now you'll have to access it through their IP address) reports that it has been censored by U.S. court injunction (it is also banned in China). The point of the web site is to allow people to post anonymously information - in large quantities - that governments and corporations don't want people to know. This is bad. Taking down a domain name is a drastic measure for suppressing information on the Internet. If this is not pushed...

• February 18, 2008
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CMLP Legal Guide: Deciding Whether and How to be Anonymous

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In light of Dan Schultz's excellent post entitled Anonymous vs. Scientology: A Case Study of Digital Media, I've decided to focus my post this week on the legal and practical issues you should consider if you wish to engage in anonymous speech online. This is the third in a series of posts I've put up highlighting some of the topics covered in the Citizen Media Law Project's recently launched Citizen Media Legal Guide. In the first two posts I discussed choosing a business form for your online activities and the legal issues associated with selecting a platform for online speech....

• February 17, 2008
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CMLP Legal Guide: Getting Your Content Out to the World

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This is the second in a series of posts calling attention to some of the topics covered in the recently launched Citizen Media Law Project Legal Guide. The first topic I took up was choosing a business form. In this post I discuss the various issues, both legal and practical, that arise when you select a platform for your online activities.Getting Your Words and Other Content Out to the World So you've decided that you want to publish online. There is a wide range of platforms you can use to get your words, video, and other content out to...

• February 10, 2008
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Highlights from the CMLP Legal Guide: Choosing a Business Form

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

This is the first in a series of posts calling attention to some of the topics covered in the recently launched Citizen Media Law Project Legal Guide. The first topic I'll take up is choosing a business form for your online publishing activities. There is increasing awareness that, especially if you publish content in collaboration with others, it may not be smart to simply leave the relationship "natural" or informal. But this realization raises other questions: What are your options? What are the benefits of legal formality? Will it be expensive to obtain these benefits? Will you have to...

• February 6, 2008
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Citizen Media Law Project Launches Legal Guide

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week we launched the first sections of the Citizen Media Law Project's Legal Guide. The guide is intended for use by citizen media creators with or without formal legal training, as well as others with an interest in these issues, and addresses the legal issues that you may encounter as you gather information and publish your work online. You can read the press release here. The Legal Guide, which is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, covers the 15 most populous U.S. states and the District of Columbia and will focus on the wide...

• February 5, 2008
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Questioning Candidates on Government Openness and Transparency - Pick your Top 5

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

While the mainstream media community raises awareness about open government each year during Sunshine Week, we need to push local up strategies that promote greater government transparency online so local citizen media has access to the raw "info" materials we need to improve democracy. We need to take a lesson from OMBWatch's Open Government online survey and ask questions of state and local candidate. Here is the survey introduction from OMBWatch: Open Government: What We Need to Know We deserve a more open and honest government. Elections are the time when politicians pay the most attention to people and issues,...

• January 29, 2008
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Primer on Copyright Liability and Fair Use

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As a lead up to next week's launch of the Citizen Media Law Project's Legal Guide, we are putting up longer, substantive blog posts on various subjects covered in the guide. This post, which discusses copyright and fair use in the context of citizen media, is the second in our series of legal primers. The first addressed the subject of immunity and liability for third-party content under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Because the primer is too long for me to republish here, I've included just a summary.  If you are interested in reading more, the entire...

• January 25, 2008
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Court Affirms that Single Publication Rule Applies Online

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

(Cross-posted from the Citizen Media Law Project Blog) In a case of first impression in Texas, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that the "single publication rule," which states that the statute of limitations period for libel begins to run when a defamatory statement is first published, applies to publications on the Internet. Some background on the case: on July 29, 2003, the Dallas Morning News published -- in print and on its website -- an allegedly defamatory article by financial writer Scott Burns about an accelerated mortgage program offered by Nationwide Bi-Weekly Administration, a company...

• January 16, 2008
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Court Issues Search Warrant to Unmask Anonymous Poster

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the issues we've been focusing on at the Citizen Media Law Project is whether traditional legal protections for journalists and journalism organizations are eroding as news organizations move online.  A recent search warrant seeking information about the identity of a user of the Lawrence Journal-World's website, LJWorld.com, raises serious concerns about governmental overreaching and highlights the need for adequate legal protections for website user information. Last month, an investigator at Kansas University delivered a search warrant to the Lawrence Journal-World, a highly regarded newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas, demanding access to their computer servers in order to get information...

• January 9, 2008
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Bush Signs FOIA Reform Bill Benefitting Bloggers

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

In one of his last executive actions of the year, President Bush signed into law the "OPEN Government Act of 2007" on December 31, 2007. The Senate unanimously passed the reform bill earlier in December, and it passed the House of Representatives by voice vote on December 18. The Associated Press is reporting that Bush signed the bill without comment. As I explained in a post on the Citizen Media Law Project's blog two weeks ago, the legislation substantially reforms the Freedom of Information Act and expands the definition of who is a "representative of the news media" under FOIA....

• January 1, 2008
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Primer on Immunity for User Content

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As a lead up to the launch of the Citizen Media Law Project's Legal Guide in January, we are putting up longer, substantive blog posts on our project blog discussing various subjects covered in the legal guide. The first post in the series stems from a talk I gave at the Legal Risk Management in the Web 2.0 World conference in Washington, DC. As the token academic, I had the task of providing a general overview of the liability that publishers might face if they allow users to comment on or submit content to their sites. I adapted my...

• December 16, 2007
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iBrattleboro Moves to Dismiss Libel Lawsuit

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week, I blogged here and on the Citizen Media Law Project Blog about a lawsuit filed by Effie Mayhew against Chris Grotke and Lise LePage, co-founders and owners of iBrattleboro.com, in which Mayhew claims that Grotke and LePage bear liability for a comment a user posted on the iBrattleboro site.  You can read more about the lawsuit, and follow its progress, by accessing the entry, Mayhew v. Dunn, in our legal threats database.Today, Grotke and LePage filed their anticipated motion for jugdment on the pleadings, arguing that they are immune from liability under section 230 of the Communications...

• December 3, 2007
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Libel Lawsuit Filed Against iBrattleboro

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I just received notice that Chris Grotke and Lise LePage, co-founders and owners of iBrattleboro.com, a widely acclaimed citizen journalism site based in Brattleboro, Vermont, were sued on November 16 for libel based on a comment submitted by one of the site's users. The lawsuit, brought by Effie Mayhew, alleges that David Dunn, the former executive director of Rescue Inc., an emergency medical services organization where Mayhew works as a volunteer, libeled her in a comment on the site. According to the Brattleboro Reformer, which reported on the lawsuit yesterday: The suit pertains to a Sept. 30 comment posted to...

• November 28, 2007
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When Mobile Media Becomes Political

by Paul Lamb
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

MobileActive.org posted an interesting interview with "Artivist" Ricardo Dominguez, who is working on a locative media project designed to assist immigrants crossing the border to the U.S. from Mexico. His work-in-progress concept, called the Transborder Immigrant Tool, leverages GPS enabled cell phones to aid in the safe passage of desert border crossers. "The device seeks to reduce the number of deaths along the border by helping immigrants locate resources such as water caches and safety beacons." Not only is the tool seemingly well designed (read below) for the population it targets, but it seems relevant for remote and wilderness emergency...

• November 23, 2007
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Citizen Media Law Project Launches Legal Threats Database

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

At the Citizen Media Law Project we've finally finished building the interface for our Legal Threats Database, and I am excited to announce its public launch today. (If you would like to read our news release, you can find it here.) The database, which is funded by the Knight Foundation, catalogs the growing number of lawsuits, cease-and-desist letters, and other legal challenges faced by those engaging in online speech. We have already collected legal threats from 35 states and 9 countries, and the database is growing daily. These threats range from copyright infringement lawsuits filed against bloggers to cease and...

• November 7, 2007
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Reader Comments: Send Me Your Success Stories

by Steven Clift
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I am working up a post on reader comments to news stories on media sites, comments on media-hosted blogs, or media hosted online forums. At the recent Online News Association conference there was definitely a sense of turmoil surrounding reader comments online. I'd hate to see interactivity switched off due to the lack of "here is how we make it work" knowledge sharing. Those in local media are in particular asked to send in some success stories. Please comment here or privately to me - clift@publicus.net - about your success stories. Add links to examples when possible. Some questions to...

• October 31, 2007
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Importance of Knowing Local Laws: The Phoenix New Times Arrests

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

There's been extensive coverage (here, here, here, and here) in the last week of the arrest and subsequent dismissal of charges against Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, the founders of the Phoenix New Times, a print and online newspaper. Lacey and Larkin were arrested for violating Arizona's grand jury secrecy statute, which makes it a criminal offense for anyone to disclose a "matter attending a grand jury proceeding," after they published details from a grand jury subpoena they received.  In a post published on our site yesterday, the Citizen Media Law Project's assistant director Sam Bayard offered a careful...

• October 25, 2007
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U.S. House Passes Federal Shield Bill, Changes Who is Covered

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the things we are doing at the Citizen Media Law Project is keeping our eye on new legislation that might have an impact on non-traditional journalists.  Yesterday, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed -- for the first time ever -- a federal shield bill by a vote of 398 to 21. This follows on the heels of the Senate Judiciary Committee's passage of a similar bill on October 4. The House version, however, makes a critical change in the language regarding who is entitled to the bill's qualified protections by excluding those who do not receive "substantial...

• October 17, 2007
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Citizen Media Law Project: Where We've Been and Where We're Going

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

We formally launched the Citizen Media Law Project's website in April 2007, so it's about time that I provided an update on what we have been up to and where we are headed in the next few months.  First, however, a bit of background on my project. The Citizen Media Law Project (CMLP), a joint venture between Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Center for Citizen Media, is creating a set of online legal resources for citizen journalists. This will include state and federal legal guides; advice on business formation; and a database of lawsuits,...

• October 15, 2007
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