Yesterday the Brighton and Hove Community Reporters group kindly invited me to speak at their December meeting, which marked the project’s first birthday. I was there to talk about some research I did over the summer, about legal issues for small / independent online publishers. The basic idea was to look at what happens when people don’t have the support and resources of large media organisations.
I kept the talk pretty brief (they’d already had to wait 50 mins for me to make it through the snow from north London) but we had a lively Q&A afterwards, with some really interesting experiences thrown into the mix. The nice thing about the group is the diversity of participants’ professional backgrounds, either in journalism or other fields.
I spoke with the big disclaimer that I’m not actually a lawyer, and speak as a blogger/researcher, but hope I was able to give a useful introduction to some of the issues that bloggers or social media users face when it comes to media law.
- Andrew Brightwell has some liveblogged notes here
- My survey project can be found on this page
- The ‘investigation’ continues on Help Me Investigate here
- Or on LinkedIn
Here are my top 5 media law resources for getting your head around the issues (this is an entry-level list):
- McNae’s Essential Law for Journalists, 20th Edition
- David Price guide to media law (free and online!)
- Guardian.co.uk media law news
- BBC College of Journalism legal guide
- HMCS legal glossary
For media law news by lawyers I recommend Out-Law.com and the Inforrm blog. One final additional link to look at: Sense About Science’s new guide for bloggers, uploaded here.
My presentation is on Slideshare, or below:
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