Posts under ‘Issues’

Editor & Publisher reports that Wendy McCaw, the eccentric owner of the Santa Barbara (California) News-Press, isn’t just presiding over the meltdown of a newspaper. She’s suing a freelance journalist who wrote about her activities, claiming an American Journalism Review article was defamatory. Needless to say, people familiar with journalism and the First Amendment are […]

Earlier this week I posted this piece about video news releases (VNRs) and their undisclosed use by TV “news” programs. I loathe the practice, but worry more about the negative consequences of federal intervention, which some favor, than the good it might do. Diane Farsetta, senior researcher at the Center for Media and Democracy, one […]

Manchester (NH) Union Leader: Gingrich raises alarm at event honoring those who stand up for freedom of speech. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich yesterday said the country will be forced to reexamine freedom of speech to meet the threat of terrorism. Gingrich is voicing what all too many Americans believe, that free speech […]

(This is a column I wrote for PR Week.) The VNR mini-scandal took a sadly predictable turn earlier this month. Two media and marketing watchdog groups issued a new report showing that the use of unlabeled VNRs by local TV “news” programs was continuing even in the face of heightened scrutiny. The report, from Free […]

NY Times: ‘Ill-considered’ book, interview called off after fierce criticism. Bowing to intense pressure both outside and inside the company, the News Corp. on Monday canceled its plans to publish a book and broadcast an interview with O.J. Simpson in which he was to give a hypothetical account of how he might have murdered his […]

UPDATED SF Chronicle: ISP not responsible for online libel, state’s top court rules. People who claim they were libeled on line can’t sue the Internet service providers that carried the messages, the California Supreme Court ruled today. The unanimous ruling reversed an October 2003 decision by a state appellate court in San Francisco that would […]

Washington Post: O.J. Deal Leaves Sour Taste in Many Mouths. The two-part, two-hour TV interview is scheduled to be aired on the Fox network Nov. 27 and 29 and was conducted by hard-charging and controversial publisher Judith Regan. The show will run before the Nov. 30 release date of Simpson’s pseudo-confessional tome, “If I Did […]

Charlie McCollum (San Jose Mercury News): Fox digs deep in the sleaze, comes up with an O.J. Simpson special. Mike Darnell, the head of Fox’s alternative programming department and the man most responsible for bringing “If I Did It” to the airwaves, did say in the release that “this is an interview that no one […]

Seth Finkelstein: Wikipedia, and the difficulties of criticizing digital-sharecropping. In brief, there’s two important ideas somewhat in conflict: 1) (fact) There are new businesses which can be built on data-mining or large collections of small amounts of unpaid labor 2) (belief) There is social or economic value in openness and commons Fascinating discussion here, stemming […]

Lawyers for YouTube apparently sent lawyers after Techcrunch for an copyright offense that doesn’t sound offensive. Bozo behavior ascendant.