Rolling Stone Highlights FBI's Fascination With Staging Its Own Terrorist Plots... While Ignoring Real Threats

from the feeling-safer? dept

We've been covering for a while now how the FBI keep setting up and stopping its own terrorist plots in order to make headlines. A few weeks ago, the NY Times wrote about this and now Rolling Stone has its own entry on the subject, which goes one step further, noting that while the FBI keeps turning hapless nobodies into terrorists to arrest and splash all over the front pages, it seems to be ignoring groups that actually represent real threats, because they just don't make nearly as interesting a story. Rather, as the article notes, the FBI seems focused on "ideological enemies" to take down, rather than those who are most likely to actually cause harm:

The contrasts are extraordinarily instructive. When federal law enforcement agencies take an affirmative role in staging the crimes, the U.S. Justice Department then prosecutes, leaving more clear-and-present dangers relatively unbothered, the State is singling out ideological enemies. Violent white supremacists are not one of these enemies, apparently – because, as David Neiwert, probably the nation’s top journalist on the subject, told me, the federal government has much less often sought to entrap them, even though they are actually the biggest home-grown terrorism threat. That is unconstitutional, because law enforcement’s criterion for attention has been revealed as the ideas the alleged plotters hold – not their observed violent potential.

At some point, you have to wonder how much longer the FBI will be allowed to keep staging bogus threats just so they can arrest people, while mostly ignoring people who are actually trying to pull off violent attacks within the country.

Filed Under: doj, fbi, rolling stone, terrorism

Rolling Stone Sued For Text Messaging Spam

from the a-text-message-gathers-no-moss dept

Rolling Stone publisher, Wenner Media, has been hit with a class action lawsuit over spam text messages that were used to aggressively promote Rolling Stone, US Weekly and Men's Journal. Of course, it's not clear that this is actually illegal. The lawsuit is based on a law that forbids the automatic dialing of marketing phone calls to mobile phones, but it's not clear if that actually applies to SMS messages as well.

Filed Under: rolling stone, spam, text messages
Companies: wenner media

Rolling Stone's 'Print First' Mindset Shows How They Lost The Community

from the they've-gone-elsewhere dept

Last week, my brief remarks at the Techdirt Saves* Journalism event focused on the fact that the news business has always really been the "community" business. The point was that the way the journalism business used to work was that they built up a community of folks around the local news, and then sold their attention to advertisers. The problem that many in the industry are facing is that there were many competing ways to build community, and most of the "business model" ideas coming out of certain publications seemed to work against community building. Doing things like making it difficult to view or read stories, and even more difficult to comment -- such as putting up paywalls -- do exactly the opposite of what you need to do if you want to build community.

To some extent, part of this discussion is recognizing whether a publication is taking a digital-first strategy or a paper-first strategy. We've seen some publications really working hard to embrace a digital mindset, but others still appear to think that their entire purpose is to sell more paper copies, even if that hurts the digital community. A great example of this appears to be Rolling Stone magazine, which has the "big story" of the week, in doing a profile on General Stanley McChrystal, which resulted in him getting fired.

Whatever your opinion is of the story itself, an interesting sidenote is how Rolling Stone promoted the story. It apparently hoped this story would sell a lot more copies of the magazine, so it held off posting the digital copy, but instead, sent it around to other publications, allowing all those other publications to get the "scoop" and the traffic:

Rolling Stone didn't even bother putting it online before they rolled it out [to other publications]. In fact, despite the fact that everyone else's website led the profile, Rolling Stone's site led with Lady Gaga's (admittedly impressive) machine gun jumblies all day and didn't even put the story online until 11:00 ET.

On top of that, when Rolling Stone finally got around to putting up the story, it didn't actually get much community action. Nieman Labs notes that a day later, the story that kicked off this whole thing only had 16 comments. Stories on other sites had thousands of comments. Partly this was because RS was late. But, as Nieman points out, RS makes it incredibly difficult to comment on the site. Numbers of comments are certainly not the only factor in judging the popularity of a story (and, in our experience comment numbers and traffic numbers do not correlate well), but you would think that the biggest story of the week, from the publication that supposedly "broke" the story, could get a few more comments.

Basically, in an attempt to push people to the paper edition, it looks like Rolling Stone missed out on a huge internet opportunity.

On a separate note, since we were just talking about the Associated Press vigorously defending the whole "hot news" doctrine, it is worth noting that the AP was one of the first publications to run a story about the whole McChrystal situation -- well before Rolling Stone put the article online. Under the AP's interpretation of hot news, it certainly sounds like it it "freeloaded" off of Rolling Stone, making it more difficult for Rolling Stone to make money... doesn't it?

Filed Under: community, journalism, rolling stone

Can Rolling Stone Sell T-Shirts Of Its Covers? It's Not That Simple, Apparently...

from the ah,-intellectual-property dept

Well, here's an interesting lawsuit. Apparently, Rolling Stone magazine decided it wanted to try selling t-shirts of some of its covers. Considering the market for t-shirts, that might not be a bad idea (especially when compared to the market for magazines these days). Obviously, the magazine and its publisher Wenner Media own the copyright on their own covers, so there shouldn't be any problem, right? Not so fast. Since the covers usually include musicians, and those musicians have vast merchandising businesses themselves, some of the companies who handle the merchandising for some top artists have sued, claiming that they have exclusive licensing deals to sell products with those musicians. Rolling Stone is arguing both that it has a First Amendment right to do this, and a fair use defense to any intellectual property claim. I'm reminded of a recent case involving magazine covers, where the use of those magazine covers in a book (by someone else) was deemed fair use, though the details are obviously quite different. Still, it probably won't surprise many people that I tend to think Rolling Stone should prevail here. The key aspect of what they're selling is that the designs are Rolling Stone covers -- not specifically which band is on the cover.

Filed Under: copyright, magazine covers, rolling stone, t-shirts

Rolling Stone Recognizes The Future Of Music: Forget The CD, Sell Other Stuff

from the sounds-familiar dept

Video Savant writes in to let us know about a new Rolling Stone article that probably won't be all that surprising to folks who read Techdirt on a regular basis. Basically, bands today aren't relying on CD sales to make money (or even as a measure of their own success). Instead, they're using the music to sell all sorts of other things having to do with themselves. While the article does focus a lot on licensing deals, the much more interesting deals aren't the ones where songs are licensed, but where the musicians themselves are being paid to create new music. That's what the guys from They Might Be Giants are doing: Dunkin' Donuts is paying them a million dollars to create new music for Dunkin' Donuts commercials.

The article also touches on how important the video game market is for the music industry these days, talking about efforts by bands to license their songs into video games, knowing how much more attention it gets them. While some video games will pay good money to license songs, it seems like bands are so eager for the exposure that many would (and probably should) do it for free -- knowing that the increased exposure will help them with everything else they do. On that note, another reader, Lucretious, sends in a story about how the video games Rock Band and Guitar Hero are driving tremendous interest in music, to the point that bands are releasing songs for use in those games even before an album comes out.

Of course, what may be most amusing, is that the Rolling Stone article reads remarkably similar to a USA Today article we wrote about three years ago, which looked at how the Chinese music industry had successfully adapted to rampant unauthorized copying of music. Musicians there learned to adopt new business models and thrive -- just as bands in the US are doing today. While the CD may be disappearing, the music business continues to thrive.

Filed Under: business models, music, rolling stone