Sorry it’s been so long, but it’s been crazy busy as TBD’s preparing for the holidays and other events. This’ll be a quick one, just a few links I’ve been reading of late. Have a happy Thanksgiving, folks.
Social media roundup
- How Investigative Journalism Is Prospering in the Age of Social Media – Great ideas from several resources gathered by Vadim Lavrusik at Mashable on how to use social media in investigative reporting and newsroom projects. Includes tips on Crowdmap, Storify, Twitter crowdsourcing, data searches and more. A great post to pass on to the social media haters in your newsroom.
- RockMelt: The User Manual– If you don’t know about Rockmelt or want to know more on how to use the new social browser, here’s a great guide from the NY Times.
- 6 innovative uses of Tumblr by newsrooms – The big media companies are only now getting into Tumblr, but there’s a lot of possibilities out there for it.
- Engaging Facebook fans with clever, conversational updates – Great ideas from Web Up the Newsroom for writing interesting status updates on a media outlet’s Facebook page to drive traffic to content and drive discussion online.
- In this disturbing bit from FishbowlDC, a Washington Post editor says “crediting the original source of a scoop isn’t “a requirement or even important” because “all news originates from somewhere” and “unless one is taking someone else’s work without attribution (that is, plagiarizing it) any news story should stand on its own and speaks for itself as an original piece of work.” Hm.
- How News Organizations Are Generating Revenue From Social Media – Another great Mashable rundown of the top ways online media is generating revenue using social media and more to hit new audiences.
On the TBD Front
- TBD: Hunting for a new business model for regional news – Great outside analysis of the business model TBD’s trying to pull off at the local level by the Guardian’s Kevin Anderson.
- Q&A with Steve Buttry: Transparency and editing in a digital world – My boss, Steve Buttry, talks to the American Copy Editors Society about TBD’s workflows and policies on copyediting, social media, headline writing and news editing in D.C.
- The 6 Hottest Journalism Startups Of 2010 – Business Insider highlights 6 news startups of note in 2010 – includes great niche pubs from the Awl, DNAInfo and TBD.
Don’t make promises about UGC you can’t keep
By Mandy
On November 18, 2009
In Industry News & Notes
It may be old news to media law nerds like me, but the ongoing case of Barnes v. Yahoo has revealed a potential minefield of legal trouble for media websites of all sizes in something as simple as a broken promise.
Don't make promises!
As most every media person knows, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 grants immunity from liability to service providers (including media sites) for user-generated content, even if it is defamatory. The Barnes case re-asserted that protection, but it also revealed a possible loophole in that immunity that can occur if you promise to remove content – and don’t follow through.
The case, in short:
It started with a bad breakup. Cecilia Barnes’ ex-boyfriend put personal info and lewd photos of her in a Yahoo profile soliciting for sex. She tried to contact Yahoo to get the defamatory profile removed and eventually got through to a person who said they’d take care of it. They didn’t.
And it was there that the loophole appeared. Aside from the issue of defamation in relation to the content of the profile, Barnes’ suit has a claim for breach of contract from Yahoo for not taking down the profile as promised.
While U.S. contract law typically requires evidence of a contract, there’s a judicial doctrine known as “promissory estoppel” that makes a promise like that at Yahoo a contract.
So, that broken promise, essentially, is the contract that was broken – and thus, a whole other Pandora’s box is opened.
The lesson for you? If you have comments or other kinds of user-submitted content on your website or blog and someone calls to complain about something in that content, whatever you do – don’t make any promises to remove it if you don’t want legal responsibility for it.
I know from experience on these kind of calls that you want to say you’ll take care of it right away, but don’t. Say you’ll look into it. Tell everyone in your newsroom to say the same.
And finally, for the love of God, don’t put up profiles of your ex-girlfriends on Yahoo – prank calls are far less problematic.