Posts under ‘Issues’

HerdictWeb: “the first collaborative, real-time map of Internet accessibility and it needs your input.” This is a fabulous new Berkman Center project. Please consider joining the herd. Congrats to the team that put this together.

UPDATED Forbes: Boss Got Raise As Philly Papers Tanked. As the parent company of The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News slid toward the Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing it made over the weekend, one employee did well on the pay front: CEO Brian P. Tierney. How disgusting is this? The arrogance of the people like Tierney […]

Consumerist: Lawsuits: Law Firm ‘Jones Day’ Usurps Monster Cable For Stupidest Trademark Lawsuit Ever. Jones Day is a law firm that doesn’t want anyone else to use standard, everyday formatting for links in news stories about its staff, and it succeeded in forcing a small start-up to cave in to its demands. This is so […]

Michael Goldfarb, a web editor for the right-wing Weekly Standard, was a blogger on the McCain campaign last fall. In a Q & A with CJR, he says, among other things, that he was told his role would be to “attack the press” in the blog: And that struck me as a really bad idea, […]

Washington Post: New Obama Orders on Transparency, FOIA Requests. In a move that pleased good government groups and some journalists, President Obama issued new orders today designed to improve the federal government’s openness and transparency. The first memo instructs all agencies and departments to “adopt a presumption in favor” of Freedom of Information Act requests, […]

Jason Kottke notes the new robots.txt file at whitehouse.gov — down to a single “disallow” from more than 2,400 yesterday.

StinkyJournalism.org: The Unspoken Peril for “Citizen Journalists” Surprise! You Owe the IRS Some Gift Tax! Is the “donation” of a citizen’s content (video, articles, commentaries, images) to for-profit media outlets that exceeds a fair market value of $12,000 in any single year subject to gift tax? Judging from the IRS guidelines, the answer is “yes.” […]

The Citizen Media Law Project has a terrific explainer up today — “Documenting the 2009 Presidential Inauguration” — for people who are planning to be in Washington for the Obama inauguration. It explains: During the Inauguration, heightened security measures will be in place across Washington, D.C., particularly in the areas where official events are taking […]

UPDATED One of the most intriguing current media legal cases pits GateHouse Media, which owns a pile of newspapers in New England (and elsewhere) against the New York Times Co., owner of the Boston Globe and Boston.com. (UPDATE: A Judge has denied, for now, an injunction.) I’ve been looking at this from both sides’ perspectives, […]

I’m a signer of a letter on a new site called “An Open Transition,” where a group of folks led by Larry Lessig: celebrates the incoming administration’s decision to put a Creative Commons license on its Change.Gov transition website, thereby allowing anyone to share, remix and otherwise reuse and copy the material there; and asks […]