Court Fines Patch Editor $300 Per Day For Not Revealing Sources

from the chilling-effects dept

The war on journalism isn't coming from just the federal government. Over in Illinois, a judge has fined Joseph Hosey, an editor for the AOL-owned hyperlocal news site, Patch, $1,000 plus court costs, plus $300 per day for refusing to reveal his sources on a certain story. This is pretty important. Having a journalist reveal sources basically ends that reporter's career as a serious investigative reporter because no source will trust that their information will be secret again. By definition, having the government require someone to do so certainly seems like a First Amendment violation, as it's a clear restriction on the freedom of the press. In addition, while we're skeptical of journalism shield laws (and how they can be used to exclude journalists, rather than include them), Illinois does have a shield law. Thankfully, Patch is appealing this ruling.

Filed Under: joseph hosey, shield law, sources
Companies: aol, patch

AOL Threatens Blogger With Copyright Infringement Charge... For Doing The Exact Same Thing AOL Has Done On A Large Scale

from the shameful dept

There have been plenty of accusations made against AOL's the Huffington Post concerning its habit of "over aggregating" content from other sites. While, personally, I think people who accuse HuffPo of being just an aggregator are overreacting on two separate issues (one: HuffPo does a ton of actual reporting also and two: HuffPo's aggregating adds value in its own way), it would be pretty damn hypocritical for AOL to then threaten another blogger for doing exactly the same thing that HuffPo does, wouldn't it?

Enter, Maryland Juice. A local Maryland blog, which recently had a post about some happenings in Montgomery County, which included relatively large excerpts of parts of an article from Patch, another property owned by AOL. It also included an image from the article. The Maryland Juice article included a significant amount of commentary about the article and, in particular, the photo, which was used to illustrate the point (that it was not a representative sample of county residents at the local meeting). And, yet... AOL lawyers sent a cease and desist letter:

As owner of the Content, AOL has the obligation to prevent the improper use of its proprietary material. Before pursuing any additional avenues to remove the Infringing Content, we are demanding that MarylandJuice.com take immediate steps to remove Patch’s image and either 1) display no more than a 1-2 sentence snippet of this Content, with credit explicitly given as well as a link back to the full article available at http://wheatonmd. patch.com/articles/proposed-rule-change-for-accessory-apartments-meets-opposition ; or 2) remove and disable access to all Infringing Content, and agree to never repost or use the Infringing Content or any other AOL Content, absent compliance with the third-party use guidelines identified above.

David, the Maryland Juice blogger, explains how excerpting, discussing and linking is all part of being neighborly online, and tells AOL to shove off, claiming fair use. Of course, you know who should know an awful lot about this kind of thing? Yeah, AOL and HuffPo. You see, a few years ago, when HuffPo tried to do its own "hyper local site," it was accused of doing more or less the exact same thing (but with less commentary, and more copying):

And seeding HuffPo Chicago is a scheme whereby the publication takes some — in many cases all — of the content from another site, with a link back to the original.

The result is quick and easy traffic for the new Chicago edition, since the publication ends up catching some Google searches for keywords contained in the (Chicago-related) articles it takes. HuffPo already has good Google PageRank, so its own version of the content floats to the top of the results, even though it was not the original source.

HuffPo's justification, at least when the publication was pulling this crap with us, taking the entirety of our RSS feeds, was that the reprinted posts were good promotion, since they included (a totally buried) backlink to the original content on our site.

But, apparently, when someone does it to AOL, it's no longer okay? Now that's hypocritical.

Filed Under: aggregation, chicago, fair use, linking, maryland, maryland juice
Companies: aol, huffington post, patch

Journalism Isn't Dead: More Journalism Projects Getting Funded

from the ain't-dead-yet dept

Last week, in yet another post about old school journalists complaining about the supposed "death" of journalism, someone complained in the comments, saying that the "utter lack of interest" from venture capitalists concerning journalism startups should disprove that there are others out there who can build such a business. That seems like a ridiculous criteria (venture capital interest is hardly a barometer of what works and what doesn't). But, even if we assume that you need to see VC interest, well, then that commenter is wrong also. Someone anonymous pointed us to the recent launch of Patch, a company that is hiring full-time journalists and building hyperlocal community sites and is funded by Polar Capital. And that's hardly the only one. In the last month alone I've had conversations with three different VCs looking at journalism startups and exploring whether their models made sense. Once again, we're seeing that if there's demand for a product (journalism), there will be businesses that will figure out ways to supply it. Not all will succeed. In fact, many will fail. But from that we'll certainly come up with models that work.

Filed Under: funding, journalism, startups
Companies: patch, polar capital