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newschallenge.org
David Ardia wants to answer citizen journalists' legal questions. |
Citizen journalists and other amateur media creators need legal literacy -- so says
David Ardia, director of the
Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard's
Berkman Center. Ardia recently won a
$250,000 Knight News Challenge grant to help develop and online resource on legal issues related to the practice of journalism.
The Citizen Media Law Project will offer several tools designed to help people with media law questions, including an archive of past litigation and legal guides.
Recently, guest contributor Daniel Schultz talked to Ardia about this project.
Schultz: What makes your project different from other media law resources?
Ardia: We're focusing specifically on the needs of citizen journalists. But we won't just dump the information onto the Web and call it a day. We'll integrate everything and make it taggable and searchable. For example, users will be able to read about an area of law in our legal guide and on the same page find recent relevant cases, blog posts, and news.
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We also plan to make this a conversation and hope to build a community of journalists, lawyers, academics, and others who are interested -- and proactively engaged -- in issues relating to journalism, new media, and law on the Internet.
This kind of resource simply does not exist today. It needs to exist for community journalism to survive and flourish online. Unlike established media organizations that have the resources to pursue important reporting in the face of legal challenges, citizen journalists are particularly vulnerable to legal threats and coercion. They also need to understand other aspects of the law, such as the legal implications of setting up a for- or non-profit business.
As citizen media sites experiment with different approaches and models, it will be essential that they have a place to go for legal help. Without legal assistance, it is easy to imagine how one threatening letter could close an important avenue of reporting or one lawsuit could shut down a promising community news site.
Schultz: What are the biggest problems you expect this project to face?
Ardia: As with any educational project, one of our biggest challenges is to take a rather daunting set of materials and concepts and distill them down into practical advice for non-lawyers. A related challenge is to present the information in a compelling and understandable way. We don't want to overwhelm people, but we do want to be as comprehensive as possible.
To overcome these challenges we are working on creating multiple ways to access the information. In our early visualization of this, you will be able to access this information like you would pages in a book, with an index and table of contents.
Alternatively, if you don't know where to start -- and we expect that many people won't intuitively know that fair use is a defense to copyright infringement and can be found in the intellectual property section of the guide -- we will lead you to the information through a series of interactive questions.
Finally, we hope that search technology will help us in those cases where people know what they want but not where to find it.
Schultz: Let's say I'm thinking of starting a citizen journalism group in my town. What information would I need to know that the Citizen Media Law Project could help me find?
Ardia: Our goal is to provide you with guidance every step of the way. For example, we will get you started by helping you decide whether it makes sense to create a formal business and steer you to the necessary forms and requirements for your state if you chose to go that route. We will also help you decide on practical things like insurance, privacy policies, and Web site terms and conditions.
Sections of our legal guide will show you how to use the law affirmatively to get access to government records and meetings as well as your rights to engage in newsgathering activity on public and private property. We will also give you guidance on how you can minimize your legal risks when it comes time to publish your content and the contributions of others on your site. And we'll explain how to license your work and how to use the content and trademarks of others.
If you end up on the receiving end of a legal threat, we will give you guidance on how to respond and where you can go for help. Within the next year we hope to be in the position to take on some of these cases ourselves.
Schultz: Will you be developing any tools that people could apply to new problems in (or out of) professional journalism?
Yes. We are developing a "decision tree" module for Drupal (an open-source content management system) that will use a series of interactive questions to lead users to relevant information. Our entire site will run on Drupal and everything we develop will be made available to the Drupal development community.
Schultz: Do you have anything else you would like to say to or ask of the professional journalism community?
We have a lot of ground to cover and are eager to get suggestions and comments from all quarters. Having spent several years as in-house counsel at a large newspaper, I know that legal issues are often on the minds of professional journalists.
So please come to our site -- tell us what you think and point out what we are missing. We need everyone's help to make this work.
Guest contributor Daniel Schultz is an information systems undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University.
