Notes on media law for the little guy

jtownend — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 14:31:14 +0000

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):

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:

Media law and ethics » small publishers

Notes on media law for the little guy