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Jun
17
[Update: Here's MSNBC on it. It's got a bit of a nasty, snarky edge to it, but is only inaccurate in its analogizing of the Media Bloggers Association to the United Organization of Anarchists.]
Do yourself a favor and read the entire article but the gist is this: From the AP’s perspective:
“We need to protect our content, no matter who’s using it, but we also recognize that the bloggers perform a really important function on the Internet in terms of increasing the engagement of the audience online, and we want to facilitate that,” Kennedy said.
…within the confines of “fair use” which allows short quotations of copyrighted material.
From the bloggers’ perspective:
For the bloggers’ part, Robert Cox will be working with Jim Kennedy to fashion “…a clearer understanding among bloggers about what kinds of use of AP stories would or would not trigger legal complaints.
“Up until now there hasn’t’ been a concrete articulation of what they expect,” Cox said. “I think that would go a long way to pre-empting problems,” he said, adding that “I think the desire is there on both sides to get this sorted out.”
Five days ago, I wrote about the precipitating events, including a reference to Jeff Jarvis’s post, bluntly titled, “FU AP,” which includes a comment from Jim Kennedy. Liza at Culture Kitchen may not have been the only one to mention Bob Cox (he of Newsweek.com’s The Ruckus, bloggers at the Libby trial and the person responsible for me getting credentials for the Cleveland presidential primary debate), but it was a great idea and I’m very pleased to see it move in this direction.
Good luck, Bob. Let us know if you need back up, which is highly unlikely.
By Jill Miller Zimon at 12:01 pm June 17th, 2008 in Blogging, Business, Courts, Law, Media, Politics, Tech
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7 Responses to “I love blogs! AP’s Jim Kennedy, Robert Cox of Media Bloggers Assn. to meet”
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Bloggers Media Association? Never heard of them.
I suppose they havent heard of me either.
Jill, I’d be happier if I knew more about these guys.
I sense that they’ll be too easily rolled.
I maintain that we have the right to save entire articles to our hard drives (AP doesn’t), so that we can compare what they wrote about an event during, say, Hour 1 to what they wrote 12 hours later (meanwhile, Hour 1’s report would have disappeared).
That is an essential element of monitoring what these guys do, because it reveals how their mindset changes original raw news stories.
There’s also the issue of AP or other media outlets flushing reports down the memory hole if subsequent events make them look like fools. Though google cache and archive.org make that a big difficult, they don’t hang on to every iteration, and the news orgs can prevent Internet archiving from happening.
I doubt that MBA is even considering either of these or other related points.
These are among the points FreeRepublic wanted to make 10+ years ago before the LA Times made it clear that they were going to wear FR down financially if they didn’t settle.
I’ve known of Robert Cox and MBA for at least three years. During the 2006 elections, I spoke to him about situations related to the MSM appropriating content from Jeff Coryell and others. When LA authorities wouldn’t accept certain credentials related to debate coverage, he advised. He has been involved in countless similar situations and is a tireless advocate.
You underestimate him at your own risk.
I depend on traditional media to provide me with content to comment on and I try very hard to not only credit their work but to also steer readers to the original. Without our support that news gathering capability will suffer and so will the American public.
This should be a two way street, mutual respect for work should be the rule in publishing.
As an odd aside, when Murdoch fired the WSJ editor I wrote a scathing post, the headline appeared on WSJ Online through Blogburst. It was not my first attack on the Murdoch purchase of WSJ and Sitemeter has recorded their interest. Off topic, but odd enough I thought is might interest.
#3, Well Jill, if he doesn’t bring up the matters I mentioned, I will not have underestimated him.
I went there and signed up for member info when it becomes available, and sent Cox an e-mail with my concerns. I might post it.
[...] (HT to Jill at WLST for the [...]
Chuck - thanks for sharing that. I agree that it should be a two-way street - I think traditional media is so consumed with the fact that their profit margin will never be what it used to be that they are literally freaking out before our eyes and not in their best interest. It’s far from shaking out.