The Blog Peoria Network

Here is a nice, comprehensive list for bloggers from Knight Citizen News Network.

For those who don’t know, the Associated Press is telling bloggers that they are violating copyright laws when the reprint any part of an Associated Press article. It’s BS of course, because fair use laws allow for the reprint of small parts of an overall article. It’s been an established part of communication law for a very long time.

This is of concern to Peoria media because it could affect Peoria’s bloggers. I’ll let Jeff Jarvis (one of my inspirations) tell the story:

That, you see, is the AP way: the mill. That is not our way: the ethic of the quote and link. The AP is still trying to preserve its way. But, as I often say, protection is no strategy for the future. In the story - which, note, I’m only summarizing here, without the quotes from the AP that might better state its stance (ahem) - the agency comes off like a policy ping-pong game, going back and forth: We want to threaten but not to sue, we want to be reasonable but we’re still going to demand that Cadenhead take down excerpts, we don’t know what the hell to do. Maybe back off, AP. Because we won’t.

Exactly. Jarvis points out that the Associated Press way — taking the work of it’s members, rewriting it to make it shorter, and then passing it off to readers as somehow original — is itself disingenuous.  The “blogger way” is more ethical. We clip a few paragraphs, identify the source and link to the source. It’s transparent. The AP way is not. The true origin is hidden from public view.

In my career, I recall two stories picked up by the Associated Press.Both ran without any attribution to me. And at least once, they screwed it up and made the subject of the article — in this case, country music singer Garth Brooks, look like a jerk when he visited Jacksonville, Ill., when he was anything but.

My advice to Blog Peoria members: Go ahead and quote AP articles if your want and link to the source.

NOTE: The following was sent to me by Rich Miller, and is of interest to those interested in online journalism:

After a decade, the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication has decided to cease publication of OJR.org. The archives will remain online, but there will be no new articles.

One of OJR’s goals over the years has been to help mid-career journalists make a successful transition from other media to online reporting and production. I’m pleased to say that USC Annenberg will continue to provide support in that area, through the Knight Digital Media Center. I encourage OJR readers to click over to http://www.knightdigitalmediacenter.org and its blogs, if you are not already a regular reader there.

The decision to close OJR means that I have left the University of Southern California. But I am not going offline. I will continue to write, daily, about new media and journalism at my new website, http://www.sensibletalk.com . I hope that many of you will click over and visit me there.

Finally, on behalf of OJR, I want to thank you. Thank you for your readership, tips, corrections, kind words and support. And I want to wish you success as you work to build engaging, informative and sustainable websites, to better serve your audiences.

From The Associated Press, here’s an article about a training seminar for citizen journalists. The seminar on the basics in journalism was offered by the Society of Professional Journalists. A few interesting paragraphs:

Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., which supports working journalists, praised the effort to offer training to so-called citizen journalists.

“I think that what we’re moving toward is some kind of positioning between amateur and professional,” Clark said.

Because there are no quote marks around “so-called citizen journalists,” I’m going to assume the words belong to Caryn Rousseau, the so-called journalist working for the Associated Press, and not Poynter’s Clark.

Not that Mr. Cox manages to escape criticism. If by “some kind of positioning between amateur and professional,” he means that citizen journalists aren’t often paid for the work, he’s accurate. But if he’s using “amateur” and “professional” as euphemisms for “good” and “bad,” then he’s just being a horse’s ass.

Robert Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association, said more than 100 judgments valued at $17 million have been handed down against bloggers over the last three years — about 60 percent for defamation, 25 percent for copyright infringement and 10 percent involving privacy.

“It’s the tip of the iceberg,” Cox said. “Bloggers are being asked to write checks. The threats against bloggers are very real. The costs are very real.”

[snip]

MJ Tam, who has blogged about motherhood for eight years and attended the Chicago workshop, said she worried about how far she could go in rating baby products.

“I just want to make sure I’m doing the right thing,” said Tam. “How far can I take criticism? What’s considered libel? I need those basics.”

Don’t get me wrong, training is a good thing. But I’m not too worried about libel. The very amateur nature of most citizen journalism means there is no deep pockets for the aggrieved to go after. Ever meet a lawyer who wanted to sue someone with no money.

There have been, maybe, a half dozen times in which the threat of a libel suit has been mentioned to me. Most of the time, the complainer didn’t have any legal claim of libel, but was simply felt he or she wasn’t being treated fairly by me or a commenter. And if they had a legitimate gripe, the problem was solved by re-writing and occasionally removing the offending parts of the post or comment.

I had one blogger here who was cutting and pasting whole passages from another blog. That person is no longer blogging here.

I’m more interested in getting citizen journalists some training in how to be good journalists. And despite what lawyers, publishers and some colleges of journalism might tell us, that’s not always synonymous with avoid lawsuits.

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From a book written by an environmentalist:

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