Columbia Journalism Review

A federal appeals court judge has decided that a gossip site is not liable for content it invites users to submit, even if some of that content is illegal in some way, making it the latest decision that immunizes websites, including news sites, against liability for user-generated content.

The US Supreme Court has never addressed the issue, so there is no national standard for whether online sites and companies are liable for user submissions, though nominally protected under Section 230 of the federal communications decency act.

The court’s decision, which reversed a $338,000 judgment against thedirty.com, leaves in place, for now, immunity that websites enjoy when it comes to publishing third-party content -- like online comments on news sites -- as long as the website does not add any unlawful material to that content. (The same protection does not extend to letters to the editor in print publications, paper’s version of user-generated content.) Plaintiffs can sue the author of the comments, but not the operator of the website where the comments are posted unless the website materially changes a user’s content from lawful to unlawful.

If you spend any amount of time around freelance writers, you’re familiar with the litany of complaints. Most publications don’t pay well. Publications that do pay well expect freelancers to do so much reporting up-front, before they’ve accepted a piece, that it makes pitching a financially risky prospect. Enter the freelancer-founded collective journalism startup.

Deca, a new nonfiction platform created by an international collective of magazine writers, is based on the premise that freelance writers know what readers want and what makes a great story, at least better than staff editors do.

Deca, which will publish stories that are “shorter than a book but longer than an article,” joins longform-oriented startups like Atavist and Byliner in selling original content as individual Kindle Singles. Each Deca member agrees to write one story per year and to edit another. This commitment to editing each other is another way of circumventing more traditional magazine structures, in which editors edit and writers write, with few opportunities for switch-hitting.

Within Deca, each story idea must be approved by two-thirds of the collective, and before publication each piece must be green-lit by three-fourths of the collective. For each $2.99 Kindle Single they sell, Amazon keeps 30 percent and 70 percent goes to Deca. Of that 70 percent, 70 percent goes to author, 5 percent goes to the editor, and 25 percent goes back to the Deca general fund. That means writers can expect $1.46 -- roughly half of the sale price -- for each Kindle Single sold. And everything that’s in the collective kitty gets distributed equally among members at the end of 2014 -- meaning even its lowest sellers reap a bit more of the benefits.

Politico and Condé Nast are entering the J-school business. Politico recently announced the creation of a 10-day Journalism Institute for college students, while Condé Nast is in talks to set up academic programs involving its magazines, including Wired and Gourmet.

As journalism schools increasingly try to connect classrooms with newsrooms to ensure students will have the right skills in a fast-changing job market, news organizations are doing the same from the opposite end.

With journalism foundations calling for “the reform of journalism and mass communication education,” and academics questioning if journalism schools are teaching students the right skills, it’s hardly surprising that news outlets are more interested in training rookies. After all, many working reporters are also adjunct journalism school professors -- setting up an academic program is just one step further.

But 10 days’ training will probably give students only the most basic introduction to political reporting, and it’s difficult to say how effective Condé Nast’s program will be without knowing which universities and schools will be involved.

Though the Supreme Court has refused New York Times journalist James Risen’s appeal that he should not be made to testify in a government leak prosecution, efforts to pass a federal media shield law are gathering steam.

On June 11, more than 70 media organizations sent a letter to Senate leadership demanding a vote on a law that’s been sitting around since it passed the Judiciary Committee since last September. And in late May, the House approved an amendment proposed by Rep Alan Grayson of Florida that forbids the Justice Department from spending money to force a journalist to testify about a source.

“I think we’re really close, and the Risen situation really highlights the need for the law,” said David Cuillier, president of the Society of Professional Journalists, one of the signatories on the letter to the Senate. “There might be some senators who are still undecided and still on the fence, but I hope that they’ll now realize this is long overdue.”

A Harvard study “Who Gets a Press Pass? Media Credentialing Practices in the United States,” released by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy is the first of its kind to perform a quantitative analysis of credentialing in the US, the study captures the experience of journalists nationwide in their efforts, from 2008 to 2013, to obtain credentials from various organizations.

It also highlights the need to reform credentialing systems so they reflect the reality of the current news ecosystem -- and protect the ability of all journalists to bring news to the public. The overarching goal, according to the study, was to identify patterns in credentialing practices that would lead to “better structure and predictability in the credentialing process,” recognizing that the US journalism industry is “more diverse than ever before, with a wide array of independent newsgatherers complementing the work of institutional news organizations.”

The survey asked the respondents about their efforts to obtain credentials from 17 types of federal, state, local, and private organizations, including state legislatures, municipal governments, and county law enforcement agencies. Out of the 676 respondents who said they had applied for a credential from one or more organizations, a full 21 percent -- one out of every five -- said they were denied at least once.

As the study concludes, the results suggest that credentialing organizations give preference to formal employment relationships over other types of arrangements. The last 10 years have seen major swings in media-consumption patterns, and innovations in technology have created new means for people to commit acts of journalism -- all complicating efforts to define a journalist for credentialing, shield law, Freedom of Information fee waiver, and other purposes.

[Commentary] Newsrooms have long hired and promoted based on journalistic chops, and often that alone. The problem, of course, is what makes for a great reporter doesn’t necessarily make for a great boss. Bad bosses are a fact of life in all businesses, of course, but journalism seems to be particularly poor at developing and training managers, and there are reasons for that.

For one thing, as a percentage of payroll, non-news corporations spend nearly five times as much on training as do newspapers, according to 2008 graduate research by Teresa Schmedding, who’s now president of the American Copy Editor’s Society.

Another problem: personal traits that tend to foster reportorial excellence --independence, skepticism, aggressiveness, etc. -- can be, shall we say, counterproductive in a boss. While being abrasive may have worked in the Abe Rosenthal era, newsroom culture has changed in recent decades. The imperial boss largely has been replaced by the consensus builder, or so the literature tells us, and workers expect to be treated more civilly.

All of which leads to a suspicion that a big reason that journalists might tend to make for bad managers is that the job is just really, really hard. Nieman Reports reported that a non-journalist management expert hired to assist assigning editors said that “in 30 years of research he had never encountered a job with such intense problem-solving demands,” adding: “The assigning editors were not surprised to hear this.”

Then there’s the fact that journalists can be, well, difficult: “Managing journalists is particularly challenging, because if they’re any good, they question authority and challenge spin,” Jill Geisler, who, as head of the Poynter Institute’s Leadership and Management, says. “We want to hire those who will question authority -- except ours.”

[Commentary] Journalists have always covered “trending” topics. But in the pre-Twitter era, the trends weren’t algorithmically ranked.

As activists have clamored to create and promote hashtags to draw attention to their issues -- so-called “hashtag activism” -- journalists have had to figure out when a Twitter trend merits news coverage. Or, in some cases, whether the hashtag is news in and of itself. Increasingly, they decide that it is. Slate described hashtag activism as a way “to divert public attention to new subjects.” And indeed, many of the news stories that have been subject to the efforts of hashtag activists have succeeded in redirecting the attention of both the public and reporters toward a previously more obscure angle. In some ways, journalists should be grateful for hashtag activism.

The trending hashtag is a way to figure out what the public wants to discuss and learn more about -- with the added bonus that when journalists add more reporting and perspective to the conversation, their work gets duly hashtagged and receives an added boost. But in other ways, it’s just white noise. While hashtag activism is a good way to introduce a story or perspective into the mainstream news cycle, it doesn’t typically lead to sustained coverage of that story. Plus, Twitter itself is an incomplete picture of the public’s interests: As of 2013, only 18 percent of online adults were using it, but 58 percent of journalists were.

But for activists who want to demand journalists’ attention en masse, Twitter is far and away the best forum today.

Will the Federal Communications Commission’s proposed new rules governing Internet traffic further hurt those whose views and voices are already underrepresented in mainstream media?

Columbia Journalism Review moderated a 45-minute video chat with media entrepreneurs including Davey D, an independent journalist; Kelly Virella, who founded online hyperlocal magazine Dominion of New York and will soon launch a longform journalism publication called The Urban Thinker; and Loris Taylor, president and CEO of Native Public Media, which promotes healthy, engaged, and independent Native communities in the US through media access, control, and ownership.

The trio discussed how they already face an uphill battle when it comes to grabbing eyeballs and advertising dollars from larger, better-funded and staffed competitors. If the FCC adopts new rules that will allow prioritization of some content -- and some content providers -- over others, it will mean game over for them as well as other digital media innovators, they said.

They also argue that the end of net neutrality would not only deepen the digital divide, but would stifle innovation and creativity by discouraging the development of new media ventures, particularly those founded by people of color or that seek to serve diverse communities.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued new policies requiring that all public writings and remarks -- even by former employees -- be checked beforehand for sensitive information, and circumscribing how employees can talk about classified material that’s already out in the public sphere.

Long-time intelligence reporters say it’s too soon to say whether the directives -- in effect since April -- are specifically causing sources to clam up. But the policies contribute to a climate where government sources are increasingly twitchy about talking with reporters, even on unclassified matters.

[Commentary] It’s too early to call the Ukrainian conflict a civil war, but fierce verbal fighting has already started between newsrooms all over the country.

Amid newfound post-revolutionary freedoms, local journalists are struggling to find a balance between being “patriotic” and unbiased.

Should the Ukrainian government revoke visas of all foreign journalists refusing to use the word ‘terrorist’ in their Eastern Ukraine coverage? That’s the view of a group of 10 local journalists, including a couple of high-profile names, like Natalka Zubar, editor in chief of the “Maidan” website and a well-known civil rights campaigner, who made the request of officials in a recent public letter, published on Facebook and Maidanua.org.

It generally reflects a larger and contentious debate journalists and their audience are now having on a daily basis now in Ukraine. The use of the word “terrorist” is the hottest of the hot buttons. Amid a so-called “anti-terrorism operation” in Eastern Ukraine, local officials have used the word a lot to describe pro-Russia rebels and their supporters.

“I call on the security bodies to resume and carry out successful anti-terrorist measures aimed at defending Ukrainian citizens living in the east of Ukraine against terrorists,” Ukrainian interim president Turchynov said in a recent statement. “The Russian Federation has a new product for export. Besides of oil and gas exports, Russia has begun to export terrorism to Ukraine,” the Prime Minister of Ukraine said of the Government secession in describing the unfolding conflict in Eastern Ukraine back in April.

These statements ignore the reality that the Eastern Ukrainian rebellion also has some support from the general, unarmed population.