Media

Federal shield law clears committee in House

Yesterday the House Judiciary Committee approved an amended version of the Free Flow of Information Act. If passed, the act would shield reporters from having to testify about information they obtained through their journalistic activities. This significant step toward passing a shield law comes one year from the day I was escorted out of a Federal court room and held in civil contempt for asserting a journalist privilege.

As CNET reports, In response to concerns raised by the Bush administration and other politicians, the revised bill attempts to exclude the "casual blogger" from reaping those benefits by stipulating the protections apply only to those who derive "financial gain or livelihood" from the journalistic activity, Boucher said Wednesday. That broad rule could, however, include part-time writers who receive even a trickle of revenue from Google Ads or Blogads.com.

While the revised form of the law is not perfect, it does appear to offer a level of protection against Justice Department inquiries that doesn't currently exist. Although 33 states have some form of shield law, these protections do not apply in a federal context and several U.S. journalists have found themselves imprisoned in recent years as a result.… Read more

Dracula just got a lot more emo: Piczo, Penguin host cover design contest

Recent Walt Disney acquisition Club Penguin isn't the only Antarctic waterfowl in the news on the youth social-networking front this week.

Venerable publishing house Penguin Group has just made a tech-savvy move through a partnership with teen-oriented community site Piczo, in which young Piczo users are encouraged to design covers for a selection of classic books and submit them to a competition pool.

The contest, called "Piczo My Penguin," runs for the next four weeks. It offers up six book titles, each one chosen by a trendy music act such as Razorlight, Beck or Goldspot: Alice in … Read more

MySpaceTV to host Lonelygirl15 'season finale'

My, my, Lonelygirl15 sure has come a long way. Not so long ago, everyone thought the too-cute videoblogger was, well, a too-cute videoblogger. Then some online video fans with a shocking amount of time on their hands deduced that she was likely an actress in a staged series of video episodes. (They were right.) Now, leading lady "Bree" (played by Jessica Rose) has gone all professional on us--the new MySpaceTV video portal will be hosting Lonelygirl15's season finale.

Season finale?

On Friday, MySpaceTV--which launched in June and has been rolling out content deals ever since--will broadcast the … Read more

Women are blogging; why isn't the media listening?

The BlogHer '07 conference met in Chicago last weekend, bringing together 800 women of the 13,000 members of this vibrant online community. If you didn't hear about it, it's because the national media didn't bother to report it.

Jennifer Pozner, founder of Women in Media & News (WIMN), writes a scathing analysis of this oversight on the Women's Media Center blog, reporting that "only three Chicago newspapers covered the conference, as if this national assemblage of women writers and videographers were simply a local story. Not one national network or cable news broadcast deigned to mention it."… Read more

McCain woos techies at AlwaysOn Conference

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Republican presidential candidate John McCain asked the technology sector for help fighting "Islamic extremism" and global warming at a conference here on Wednesday.

McCain said extremists are "taking advantage of cyberspace" in new ways that will require U.S. technologists to help find better tools to thwart their efforts.

The senator from Arizona also said he's convinced global warming is real. He thanked the gathering at the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit for their efforts in developing green technologies.

"We can have debate about how serious (climate change) is," McCain said, "… Read more

TreeHugger acquisition confirmed

A representative for eco-blog TreeHugger has confirmed that the site has been acquired by Discovery Communications, parent company of the Discovery Channel, The Science Channel, Animal Planet, and several other properties. A report of the deal initially surfaced in the New York Post today.

A press release from Discovery and TreeHugger confirmed that the blog will be part of the upcoming Planet Green network, but financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The New York Post had suggested a $10 million price tag.

"TreeHugger.com is a strategic complement to our digital media portfolio, aligning perfectly with Discovery?… Read more

Facebook and journalism

First it was Friendster, then it was MySpace; now Facebook seems to be the center of every other conversation on the Internet. Several of the writers at Poynter Online (a resource that puports to be "Everything you need to be a better journalist") have recently been focusing on the possibilities for Facebook in terms of the news business.

In one article Pat Walters reports on how he created the Facebook group, Journalists and Facebook as a sort of experiment. What better way to report on Facebook, than to use Facebook? We invited about 25 journalists to join the group, posted a few questions to the discussion board and waited.

Seemed to make perfect sense.

By the time we posted this story on Poynter Online, the group had mushroomed to more than 800 members, journalists and non-journalists from all over the world. At this moment there are almost 1,800 members, but only 57 wall posts, and 22 discussion threads. In his article, Walters points out that this limited participation in the group isn't unusual and he references an article by Jakob Nielsen to illustrate this phenomena. In his article, Nielsen predicts that only one percent of any given group will create most of the content, and after a cursory glance at the Journalists and Facebook group that estimate appears to be roughly on target.

… Read more

Report: Discovery may have bought TreeHugger

The New York Post is reporting that green-centric uberblog TreeHugger may have been purchased by Discovery Communications as a companion blog to its forthcoming new cable network, Planet Green. The new channel is slated for a launch in the first quarter of next year, and has already built up some buzz for its series Eco-Town, created in collaboration with actor and Prius poster boy Leonardo DiCaprio; an already-trendy eco-blog would indeed be a desirable companion for the company.

According to the Post's Peter Lauria, the price tag for TreeHugger was somewhere around $10 million.

The New York-based TreeHugger, which … Read more

Politicos prepare for vote on blogger 'shield'

WASHINGTON--A congressional committee debate over whether to immunize journalists--including some bloggers--from revealing confidential sources has been raging on-and-off here for more than an hour, with a final vote on the bill likely to occur this afternoon.

Members of the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee have just fled their meeting room yet again to tend to votes on the House floor, interrupting the back-and-forth over the so-called Free Flow of Information Act for a second time. Their meeting, which also counted a number of other bills on the agenda, began around 7:15 a.m. PDT.

So far, politicians … Read more