Idea Lab

Finding Political Sleazemongers

by Ellen Hume
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I have invited researchers at MIT's Center for Future Civic Media to participate in an effort to blow the whistle on groups who are falsely presenting themselves as "ordinary bloggers," but instead are paid to spread false information about candidates during the 2008 campaign in viral internet campaigns to influence voters. The project, already involving students from Columbia and Harvard, traces the IP addresses of these content originators to track those who are sending out large packets of these identical negative messages and claiming to be individuals. But a MIT researcher protested that this kind of research was not to...

• October 9, 2008
• 4 comments

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
• 1 comment

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
• 1 comment

Signal-to-Noise and Related Content

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Related Content: If you're in California's bay area, don't miss Drupal Day on Friday May 3, a special open session of NewsTools2008's mixing up journalists, technologists, entrepreneurs. Journalism's charge is to increase the signal to noise ratio. Some commentators on stuff, including my favorite marketing guru, say the irrelevant noise has begun encroaching on the signal that matters, after some years of improvement driven by online tools. I wish I could tell you the easy answer. I can't. I just know that the faltering signal is a problem. As mentioned by IdeaLab bloggers and elsewhere, solving this problem is a...

• April 29, 2008
• 1 comment

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
• No comments

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
• 1 comment

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

Ubiquitous Networks: The Trails Of Our Digital Identities

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

For a while now I've been describing the locative process as overlaying a virtual landscape on the physical world. I've been describing locative media as embedded content in place. Some people do ask, "in place of what?" In the end, it's all a way of saying Locative Media is the hybridization of the virtual world and the physical world relying upon location-enabled mobile devices (eg, 50% of cellphones) leading to the formation of ubiquitous networks full of cultural content. Sounds good. The only part of that statement that's a bit tricky is the "ubiquitous networks." Not being a particularly dedicated...

• January 15, 2008
• 1 comment

Advertising and Information Asymmetry Online

by Benjamin Melançon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Mark Andrejevic: Living through the '90s, there was this euphoric set of predictions about the empowering and democratizing capacity of the new medium. I read that against what the current political and economic situation looks like today. [...] What concerns me is the way in which the celebration of the potential so quickly slides into a claim that this potential is being actualized. An interview with the author of iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era. Well worth the read. As long as the funding model for journalism is advertising-based, these issues will frame our work and - in...

• October 31, 2007
• No comments