Hello. My name is Jonathan Bailey. I’m the new guy here at the Blog Herald, once again, and I’m starting up a new column that will be running every Friday targeting the law and blogging. We’ll be tackling some of the major legal issues that bloggers face as they run their sites.

Many of you may already know me from the various sites I have either written for or currently write at. This includes a previous stint here at The Blog Herald, my ongoing Blogging Pitfalls column at BloggingPro, my hosting-related column at WhoIsHostingThis and, of course, my home site of Plagiarism Today, where I talk about copyright and plagiarism issues on the Web.

To be clear, I am not an attorney and nothing in any of my columns should be considered legal advice, but I have studied the law as it applies to mass media for over 12 years, come from a journalism background and have been studying copyright especially closely for over ten.

My goal with this column is to include a variety of pieces including general information pieces about how the law, in particular U.S. law, applies to blogging, legal news and rulings that might affect bloggers and also answer some of your questions as time permits.

With that in mind, here are just a few of the topic areas that this column will cover moving forward: read more

The International Olympic Committee’s reluctant acceptance of bloggers and social media’s participation in sharing information from the Olympic Games has been challenged by Reuters’ editor-in chief David Schlesinger.

Speaking to the International Olympics Committee Press Commission, he said that it was now not possible to control how established and new media disseminated information.

“The old means of control don’t work. The old categories don’t work. The old ways of thinking don’t work. We need to come to terms with that,” he said.

“Fundamentally, the old media won’t control news dissemination in the future. And organisations can’t control access using old forms of accreditation any more.” read more

There’s no doubt that media is in a time of change. Magazines and newspapers are hard pressed to save money, journalists are let go, there’s restructoring, and so on. All of this isn’t because of the financial crisis, but it sure speeds things up. So where do we turn for information about these things? To the blogosphere, of course, because that’s where we can read about the people that were let go, without having to filter out everything the hidden agenda of the so called old media. They are partial, you know. Of course, so is a disgruntled journo just sacked from his newspaper, but at least we expect him to be pissed.

Enter a group of anonymous people that tweet about who’s fired, who’s in trouble, and who stays. The Media is Dying Twitter account is a phenomenom, an excellent source for anxious and curious journalists and media enthusiasts altogether. And there’s plenty of them, the account’s got over 9,000 followers. The mysterious media professionals were kind enough to participate in an interview. read more

Yesterday, Twitter was used as a real-time news conference podium by the Consulate General of Israel in New York and featured on their Israel news and commentary blog, Israel Politik. In this ongoing series on Exploring Social Media and Social Media Tools, the politics in issue are not up for discussion, but the manner in how this popular social media tool was used to great a Q&A forum for discussion of a current event is worth discussing.

Called a Citizens’ “Press” Conference on Twitter, from 1300 – 1500 EST on December 30, David Saranga, Israel Consul of Media and Public Affairs in New York, answered questions regarding the situation in the Middle East regarding Israel and Gaza and all parties involved. Questions were submitted to their Twitter account, @IsraelConsulate and attempts were made to respond to the questions through the 140 character limit, with those requiring lengthy answers would be posted on the Israel Politik blog.

There were no rules, other than the typical “play nice” and all questions were welcome from any and all angles. While Mr. Saranga was the host of the Twitter event, I’m sure he had a lot of help from his staff at the Consulate to respond to the flood of questions.

Within a very short time, the “edited” version of the Twitter conference was posted in sections on the Israel Politik blog. They explained what they meant by “edited” as: read more

The Mumbai terror attack has gotten a huge amount of press on social sites like Twitter, just check out this search featuring tweets tagged #mumbai. Citizen journalism blog network Instablogs have published Global Report story featuring citizen voices, which you might want to view if you’re interested in these kind of things.

According to the Citizen’s Media Law Project, there were over 250 lawsuits filed against bloggers for defamation and another 150 lawsuits filed dealing with copyright issues. Though the number of lawsuits is still fairly small compared to the number of people blogging, there has definitely been an upward trend in recent years (link PDF).

At the same time, bloggers have been striving to gain equal footing with mainstream media representatives in obtaining access to both people and events. However, they have typically had an uphill struggle in obtaining such access for reasons that are not always clear.

Though bloggers have begun to act more and more in the same capacity as the mainstream media, they have typically not had the legal training and information nor the access of journalists. Few come from mass media or law backgrounds and thus often struggle with the legal issues surrounding blogging and even fewer have the connections and knowledge to obtain critical access to important events.

This is where the Media Bloggers Association steps in. It seeks to help grow citizen journalism by providing it with some of the same training and access that journalists in newspapers or television have. The goal is to promote blogging and citizen journalism as its own form of media and give bloggers equal footing, both in the courts and on the streets, to other journalists. read more

Helium is one of those citizen journalism sites, where people can submit stories on various topics, and hopefully be read. At first glance, it reminds me of Instablogs, one of the stronger voices for citizen journalism.

What really got me interested in Helium, however, is the Marketplace. Basically, it’s a way for writers to earn a little money on the stories they publish on Helium, because other media outlets can buy publication rights through the Marketplace. That’s a pretty cool concept, and a way for citizen journalists to, possibly, reach the more traditional journalistic publications. That is, if the content is good enough, and if Helium can push the Marketplace as a solid place for getting in on a story for other publications.

Mark Ranalli, CEO of Helium, was gracious enough to do a short interview on Helium, the Marketplace, and citizen journalism in general. read more

Blog World Expo is in Las Vegas this weekend, September 20-21, 2008. I’m going to be there with Woopra, Layered Tech, and WordPress, and from the look of the Conference Schedule, so is everyone else.

The list of Exhibitors in the Exhibition Hall at the Las Vegas Convention Center this year is incredibly diverse. So many companies want to reach out to bloggers, and so many blog, social media, and web technologies are popping up everywhere – it’s going to be interesting to learn what’s hot, what’s not, and what will be the future of the web.

Some of the exhibitors I hope to meet up with include: read more

Citizen journalism focused blog network Instablogs has opened up their network to independent blogs, as CEO Ankit Maheshwari said they would in a BloggerTalks interview. They’re calling it the Instablogs Club, with benefits for bloggers including traffic and revenues.

Ankit said the following in a press release:

“The Instablogs Club consists of those who host and maintain independent blogs and would like to avail our platform and showcase their content to millions of Instablogs readers each month. Our aim is to showcase the best blogs on a variety of topics and help bloggers get more exposure”

Check it out for yourself. You’ll need an Instablogs account, which is free.

The news-focused blog network Instablogs, which recently started to tailor content based on where in the world you are (or want to read about), is set to start including content from outside blogs as well. Ankit Maheshwari says so in an interview with BloggerTalks, published today:

We would also be opening our network to external blogs by next month, so that they can also enjoy some of network benefits which includes but are not limited to traffic, ad sales, technology, hardware, and meeting great new people working in similar fields.

This content will be called Instablogs Club, and will expose content from outside Instablogs, inside the network.
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