Idea Lab

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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Five Ways to Gather and Report News with Twitter

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I read Chris O'Brien's IdeaLab post about the latest Twitterquake and the 10 (so far) comments with a great deal of interest. After all, ReportingOn borrows a great deal from Twitter, and I've been writing about the exponentially growing micro-blogging service for around a year now. I can't help but notice that a commenter or two seem to think that anyone actually takes is seriously when Twitter asks its base question of "What are you doing?" This is what makes it easy for those who haven't sipped from the Tweetstream to write it off as crap for tweens. Actually, that's...

• August 3, 2008
• 3 comments

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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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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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
• 6 comments

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
• 2 comments