Disqus - Latest Comments for martinstabe

Re: Newsday.com: Court: State law won’t protect terror author from libel judgment

Michael Roberts- Rexxfield.com — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 14:40:23 -0000

Thanks Martin,

I am particularly fond of this ruling, (not because I am an Aussie), the victim is an Australian, the publication was available in Australia, the damages were done in Australia. I think the court's take on the situation was prudent:

Australian High Court explains in a case called Dow Jones & Co. Inc. v Gutnick:

"If people wish to do business in, or indeed travel to, or live in, or utilize the infrastructure of different countries, they can hardly expect to be absolved from compliance with the laws of those countries. The fact that publication might occur everywhere does not mean that it occurs nowhere." (per Callinan J at para 186)

AND

“ …the spectre which Dow Jones sought to conjure up in the present appeal, of a publisher forced to consider every article it publishes on the World Wide Web against the defamation laws of every country from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe is seen to be unreal when it is recalled that in all except the most unusual of cases, identifying the person about whom material is to be published will readily identify the defamation law to which that person may resort.”

Re: Newsday.com: Court: State law won’t protect terror author from libel judgment

martinstabe — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 12:25:07 -0000

Michael,

There is indeed an update on this: This case turned out to be important because it started the ball rolling on a New York State law protecting New York-based writers against "libel tourism".

Since then, the issue of US writers being sued for libel abroad, particularly in British courts, has led to the passage of an anti-libel tourism bill in the US House of Representatives. As a result, questions about this issue were also raised in the British Parliament's discussions about libel law reform.

Re: Amazon Kindle ‘great white hope of newspaper industry’

martinstabe — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 08:37:59 -0000

Bywater's optimism is probably mispaced. Why would consumers want to carry around yet another gadget and deal with proprietary formats when more and more mobile phones are providing access to the standard internet and all the news and other content available on it?

Jeff Jarvis's view in the Guardian yesterday is probably a better assessment of the Kindle's role in the future of mobile digital publishing:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jun/01/dig...

Re: Shane Richmond: Is there enough demand for print permalinks?

martinstabe — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 04:22:32 -0000

Computing magazine does something a bit as you describe it. But I suspect the Telegraph's editiorial system doesn't have the functionality you describe. I know that if I wanted to add permalinks for every story on my magazine's system, it would take a few minutes per story so Shane's estimate seems about right to me.

Re: Retail Week's 21st Birthday Party at Liberty - February 19, 2009 - Retail Week

martinstabe — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 11:28:29 -0000

@Jitterbug The pictures do have captions, but you have to hover your mouse over the "notes" to see them. Not the most intuitive interface, I admit.

Re: Is blogging a valid form of journalism?

martinstabe — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 12:32:31 -0000

What if the blog is written by a journalist who does exactly those things?
While you're right that blogs "are normally just riddled with links from journalists’ hard work", that is not a defining characteristic of the medium.

Blogs are just a simple content management system that you can use for anything, including journalism. Most, however, are not.

As for journalism having to support the journalist financially, I'm afraid I don't buy that. If you break an important story on your blog and don't get paid a penny for it, it could have the same social consequences as if you were paid.

Consider the pictures of the Hudson River plane crash first posted on Twitter. If a professional photojournalist had taken those pictures, he or she would have shopped them to the highest bidder in mainstream news organisations. The Twitter user didn't do this, but his picture still ended up all over the world.

This is a fundimental problem for those of us who make our living as journalists. People are willing to do (some parts of) our job for free. We can't just define this problem away by saying it's not journalism. We need to respond to it by finding our role in this radically changed media ecology.

Re: Journalist tells PRs: Don't email me, use Twitter instead - Press Gazette

martinstabe — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 12:38:23 -0000

Or they could use the 140 characters to send a link to something longer on a webpage.

Re: Roy Greenslade: 'No reason why we need sub-editors' - Press Gazette

martinstabe — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 07:37:07 -0000

RBI's editorial development director, Karl Schneider, this week outlined some thoughts on ideas about what production roles look like in a digital news operation, and they are fairly similar to yours:

http://fallingoffablog.typepad.com/falling_off_...

The key bit, I think, is this: "One of the challenges now is to help today's magazine production staff to make the transition to these new online roles. For publishers, it will take a commitment to providing the training and the space to lean these new skills. For production desk staff it will take a genuine willingness to re-learn their craft, sometimes giving up cherished roles and practices."

Re: Birmingham Post: Why top judge threw out libel case involving Tolkien family

martinstabe — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 08:27:07 -0000

Since I have no way of verifying your identity, I have had to remove your other comment here, which reproduced the text at issue in the libel case we are discussing.

The fact that the potentially libellous comments were reproduced elsewhere raises another interesting issue about online libel cases, the legal consequences of aggregation and so on. But that's another matter.

Unfortunately, I don't have the time to carefully moderate a comment thread on a delicate legal matter, so I will be closing comments on this thread.

However, this is a very interesting matter that raises lots of issues about the development of libel law on the web. If you want to continue this discussion as I do, please do so on your own blog(s). I will see any posts that link back to this one.

Re: Birmingham Post: Why top judge threw out libel case involving Tolkien family

Christopher Carrie — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 07:17:34 -0000

Hi Martin
On the 24th February 2007 I discovered Royd Tolkien’s posting. At the risk of acquiescing or ‘Consent’ as Justice Eady put it I reproduce it here that your readers might see just how reckless and libelous his rant was. After you’ve had time to digest the message I will post qualification of the reality of what followed.
Royd Tolkien (Visitor)
http://www.roydtolkien.com
2007-02-24 @ 10:22:08
10 Facts about Christopher Carrie

1 – Carrie has a criminal record which would prevent him working with children or vulnerable adults.
2 – Carrie is a fraudster who has tried for many years, unsuccessfully, to defraud and extract money from the Catholic Church, the Tolkien family and other celebrities.
3 – Carrie is well known to local and national police. He has been contacted by them on numerous occasions with regard to his threatening behaviour.
4 – Carrie has admitted that he lied about his sexual abuse in order to extract money from the church. (The Sun, 14th September 2004). Carrie said: “It was mischievous of me – but when there’s money on offer…”
5 – Carrie did not live within 100 miles of John Tolkien when at the time of the alleged abuse.
6 – Carrie has never won a legal case against another party.
7 – Carrie has never sued anyone who has challenged his self published lies.
8 – Carrie part owns Luna Internet. This is the only reason his website still exists.
9 – Carrie is trying to sell the film rights to his fictitious life story on eBay for £1 million. No one has bid for it.
10 – Carrie is currently a struggling IT worker who lives at * ****** Address deleted * you can contact him there.

Royd Tolkien
The blog owner changed this comment on 2007-03-09 12:05:06

Yours
Christopher Carrie

Re: Birmingham Post: Why top judge threw out libel case involving Tolkien family

martinstabe — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 12:44:50 -0000

Any case where the claimant is also the publisher of the site where the alleged libel occured is going to raise some very weird legal issues.

Mr Justice Eady's reasoning seems obvious form the moment Carrie became aware of the publication and acquiesced. That's fairly standard stuff.

I think "Observer" makes one interesting observation, though: What about the period before Carrie became aware of the comment? If the site was post-moderated, there must have been a point in the timeline when only the commenter was aware of the comment. At this point, the key issue seems to be "substantial publication" - did enough people read the comment to justify the claim of defamation?

I might give that case a closer reading!

Re: 'Digital kitemark' could distinguish journalism from 'web noise' - Press Gazette

martinstabe — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 14:47:28 -0000

Sorry if I've confused matters. I didn't mean to imply that Newscredit is some sort of top-down seal of approval, since I know it isn't.

The phrase "transparent labelling of news content" in the story is what made me think of Newscredit.

Re: 'Digital kitemark' could distinguish journalism from 'web noise' - Press Gazette

martinstabe — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 12:51:53 -0000

The Media Standards Trust is working on a metadata journalism "kitemark" of sorts: http://newscredit.org/

Re: The mobile industry’s £1bn lesson: Collaborate or die

martinstabe — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 12:24:55 -0000

There actually has been quite a bit of experimentation in this area, at the margins at least.

The New York Times' API is the most high-profile, but there are several other new organsiations taking tentative steps towards thinking of themselves as open platforms:

http://blogs.pressgazette.co.uk/fleetstreet/200...

And some places, notably the Telegraph and Guardian have, in fact, held hack days where they have " thrown their best geeks into a room" to come up with new ideas:

http://blogs.pressgazette.co.uk/fleetstreet/200...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/insideguardian/2...

Re: Private: Writing for the web: What belongs in the online style guide?

martinstabe — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 09:03:57 -0000

"Spooky synchronicity" indeed. Thanks for the link.

Re: Closures and more job cuts at Newsquest north-west - Press Gazette

martinstabe — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 12:29:53 -0000

At the time I write this, six hours after your comment, the story you're moaning about remains the second story in the "regional newspapers" section of Press Gazette. Hardly "buried away". But the fact that it's no longer on the front page is indicative of the fact that PG has a far wider remit than HTFP.

You've been moaning about Press Gazette since I still worked for it -- that's more than three months now. It's getting boring. If you're so embittered by Press Gazette's change of format and think there are better online news sources, why do keep coming back?

Re: Which CMS do they use in online journalism utopia?

martinstabe — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 08:44:34 -0000

Absolutely right.

But wouldn't you agree that most newsroom CMSs are designed specifically to do the sort of "knock out a piece of text" journalism and actually discourage the sort of mind shift towards data-driven work you describe?

To build your database-driven football tables, for example, a technically knowledgeable journalist like yourself will most likely have to step outside the constraints of the system used by the to build it from scratch.

The output from that application would then probably be piped back into the general framework that runs the paper's site with some ugly hack involving Javascript or iframes. That's an example of the creative workarounds I was talking about.

The best website editors are those who can achieve this sort of stuff in spite of whatever systems are at their disposal.

Re: One Man and His Blog: Digital Journalism: The Time For Talk Is Done

martinstabe — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 12:58:22 -0000

Fixed it now. Much easier to pronounce that way, I find.

Re: One Man and His Blog: Digital Journalism: The Time For Talk Is Done

martinstabe — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 10:12:13 -0000

Argh! Sorry.

The dangers of blogging by feed aggregation. I fixed it on delicious, but the feed must have updated the blog before I noticed the typo.

Re: Doing your smalls

martinstabe — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 07:07:03 -0000

It's not just their print sales that they are hurting with this, it's their website, too.

There are online services - not run by local newspapers sites - that do a much better job of providing this sort of basic local information.

Re: Hey j-schools, teach before you unleash

Robert Hopkins — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 08:57:06 -0000

Martin, I take your point and I apologise if I came across as aggressive in my original reply. It was a tough day!

Perhaps you're right and this has taught the students in question a valuable lesson. At the very least it's a hot talking point, and that being the case I'm glad you highlighted the issue.

Re: Judge warns of increasing internet risk to fair trials - Press Gazette

martinstabe — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 06:08:51 -0000

Testing comments Please ignore.

Re: Guardian Media Group shuts Greater Manchester weekly offices

martinstabe — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 04:34:01 -0000

Of course not. But given the vast amount of information on the internet from any number of sources - including sites like HTFP that have a narrow focus on a particular segment of the industry - it is inevitable that not all stories will be reported here first.

It works the other way around, too, of course.

If you take as given that there is more than one site on the Internet, a journalist has several options: Pretend you haven't seen stories on competitors' sites, or attempt to serve your readers by picking up those stories that are relevant to your readership and ignore the rest of the noise.

Part of a journalist's job in the age of information overload is the serve the time-pressed reader by finding and filtering the most significant bits of reliable information or significant ideas that are available online. In his other blog post yesterday, Patrick noted a thoughtful piece by a noted American media blogger - a useful site, but one that most Press Gazette readers probably don't visit every day. Should he have just pretended that wasn't out there as well?

Print publications perform the same exact function every day when they follow up competitors' stories - they are usually just much less transparent about it than this blog is.

Re: Guardian Media Group shuts Greater Manchester weekly offices

martinstabe — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 12:11:22 -0000

Press Gazette has run blog posts like this one for well over a year, so I'm not sure how this could be perceived as an "insult" that has anything to do with the move to monthly in print.

I suppose Patrick Smith could have just ignored the story on HTFP -- but then some interested readers might have missed it. Personally I think he's done the right thing by linking to it.

Incidentally, he also wrote a post about the value of linking in journalism earlier today.

(Full disclosure, BTW: I used to work at Press Gazette, and the people there are friends.)

Re: Guardian Media Group shuts Greater Manchester weekly offices

martinstabe — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 11:01:07 -0000

I guess Subscriber 1978 has never heard of blogging.

What's wrong with an "unashamed crib" that links to the complete and original report for the sake of completeness?

It's certainly preferable to the newspaper practice of cribbing without any attribution or linking. Now that's shameful.