Tag: Internet

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The economic world is structured for people with jobs. Yet the self-employed population is growing by leaps and bounds — more and more people each year are paying higher taxes and buying their own insurance. We have no institutional protections, no security, no unemployment benefits when our contracts run out.

I know I’m far from alone — freelance journalists quietly, privately lament our low, late pay, our inherent insecurity, and the dual pressure to appear productive and successful while also available for hire.

Susie Cagle talks about life as a freelancer. A must read.

(Hey, dynamofire, you’ll be into this especially, I suspect.)

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How Two Sets Of Undercover Journalists Accidentally Ended Up Investigating Each Other

How Two Sets Of Undercover Journalists Accidentally Ended Up Investigating Each Other

Two journalists from The Sunday Times set out to investigate whether Bulgarians would sell babies. And a Bulgarian journalist set out to investigate whether Britons would buy their babies.

This is both hilarious and quietly depressing, because (a) journalism, and (b) while this is happening, you know that somewhere else, the people both sets of journalists set out to try and find are quietly getting away with it.

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…it is hard to dispute that the advent of the internet as a medium and the emergence of the blog as a means of free dissemination of news and public comment have been transformative. By some accounts, there are in the range of 300 million blogs worldwide. The variety and quality of these are such that the word “blog” itself is an evolving term and concept. The impact of blogs has been so great that even terms traditionally well defined and understood in journalism are changing as journalists increasingly employ the tools and techniques of bloggers – and vice versa. In employing the word “blog,” we consider a site operated by a single individual or a small group that has primarily an informational purpose, most commonly in an area of special interest, knowledge or expertise of the blogger, and which usually provides for public impact or feedback. In that sense, it appears clear that many blogs and bloggers will fall within the broad reach of “media,” and, if accused of defamatory statements, will qualify as a “media defendant” for purposes of Florida’s defamation law as discussed above.

Blogs are officially recognized as media by a Florida court.

Take that, every hater on the Internet who thinks I’m wasting my life. I’m meedja.

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The tweet was made as part of a heated Internet debate about plaintiff’s responsibility for the disappearance of her horse. Furthermore, it cannot be read literally without regard to the way in which a reasonable person would interpret it. The phrase “Mara Feld… is fucking crazy,” when viewed in that context, cannot reasonably be understood to state actual facts about plaintiff’s mental state. It was obviously intended as criticism—that is, as opinion—not as a statement of fact.

Court rules that tweeting that someone is “fucking crazy” doesn’t count as libel.