Beware the Flying Cuisinart

     Once Upon a Time when there existed small towns with Main Streets and businesses on Main Streets, (like banks with tellers for humans, not cars, and hardware stores with nail bins and actual five and dimes) there also existed the home town newspapers, generally  weeklies.

     Even more amazing, the weekly newspaper generally had a lawyer. Not in-house counsel like those big, fancy, city newspapers, but a small-town lawyer with an office on Main Street.  He handled house closings and wills and the day to day stuff of people and businesses, including the local paper. So should there be an unfortunate altercation at a library board meeting resulting in a board member hauled out of the meeting room screaming to the chair, “Margaret, you’re not a lady.” And should the local newspaper have an actual reporter actually in the room, covering the library board meeting. And should the aforementioned Margaret not be happy with the coverage, the paper would have an attorney on Main Street. In this particular case, the paper’s attorney was also Margaret’s attorney, at least until she told him and story and he laughed so hard she hung up on him.

     It was a simpler time.

     Times are not simple anymore.

     The first Right-to-Know law, which later morphed into the Open Public Records Law, was supposed to make some things easier. It delineates what records may be kept private, very few, and how citizens can access the public ones. Like many things designed to make things easier, it doesn’t. It is overall a wonderful law because it does keep towns from hiding the many, many things they would love to hide, but it doesn’t always make things easy. Towns try to hide stuff, papers sue (requiring lawyers, again). Often they win. Towns appeal. . . .

     In an attempt to shed some light on the complications, Rutgers Institute for Information Policy and Law, the New Jersey News Commons, NJPA and SPJ held a session called “What’s New in Media Law” on Friday, Feb. 19, at Rutgers Law School in Newark.  It was originally to be held in New Brunswick, but nobody registered, proving once again if there was a pot of gold at the end of Route 287, it would be left to the Leprechauns because nobody with any sense will drive there.

     The panel was arranged by Ellen Goodman, a professor at Rutgers Law in Camden. The first session featured three lawyers:  Jennifer Borg, general counsel to North Jersey Media Group/The Record (a verifiable endangered species), Thomas J. Cafferty, NJPA general counsel, and Eli Segal of Pepper Hamilton, LLP.

     Borg spoke about the Open Public Records Act and how to get past intransigent officials. “Reach out to the municipal attorney,” she said, adding, “honey works better than vinegar.” She urged reporters to help educate the officials and work with them, adding, “for every police chief who doesn’t want to tell you are two that do.”

     Cafferty reminded the group that the feisty and formidable Loretta Weinberg is trying yet again to tighten the laws with the League of Municipalities once again opposing her. Stuck in the middle are the municipal clerks who just want to stop commercial users from data mining and making money on the hard work of municipal clerical workers.

     Another concern of the press is the Shield Law, which is absolute from a civil standpoint and nearly so from a criminal standpoint, but that “nearly” is a little nerve-wracking for reporters trying to do a good job, get all the facts and protect their sources.

    The second panel of the day got away from academic language and into the practical, with Mickey Osterreicher, general counsel for the National Press Photographers Association, discussing drones, which he described as “flying Cuisinarts.”  He pointed out that just because someone registers a drone doesn’t mean he’s going to operate it safety. Besides the problem of accidentally decapitating someone is the problem of invading that person’s privacy. He advocated using drones in cases where it is impossible to photograph from the ground and advised anyone who operates one to do so only within the line of site, during the day, under 400 feet in altitude and making sure the drone is less than 4.4 pounds. He also reminded photographers they cannot operate within five miles from an airport without notifying the airport.

    Katherine M. Bolger of Levine Sullivan Koch & Schulz, LLP, explained that hacking into people’s communications has caused judges to perceive privacy differently. Osterreicher pointed out it was George Eastman’s invention of the Brownie, which first make photography portable, that led to Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren to write “The Right to Privacy.”

    The panel all agreed the law moves glacially.

     Josh Stearns, director of journalism and sustainability at the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, summed it up by saying, “at a time when laws are being written, don’t do anything stupid.”

     Good advice.

Fear and Loathing (or not) in Montclair

     Back in the old days, people got their news from a kid on a bicycle stuffing a daily newspaper into a metal tube wired to a telephone pole or mounted on a stake in front of their house.  They paid for the newspaper and they left a big tip for the kid on the bike to make sure the paper made it into the tube and not stuck on the gutter or buried deep in a rose bush requiring extrication by someone wearing heavy work gloves.

     Nobody considered it terribly expensive. People believed news of their town, their county, their state, their country and their world was worth paying for. They would never have thought about getting that for free. Even when they got their news from radio or television, they were cognizant that the news wasn’t free, it was just being paid for by Phillip Morris and Lincoln/Mercury and CocaCola. Knowing what’s going on in the world is worth paying for. Or at least putting up with tap dancing polar bears.

     Suddenly, enter the internet, and news is free. But is it news?

     Too often, no.

      I’m not saying you have to have a journalism degree, or even any degree, to write journalism. I’m saying you have to practice not-so-random acts of journalism.

     A roomful of journalists, journalism teachers and others interested in the future of news made up the New Jersey News Summit at the NJ News Commons on the campus of Montclair State University. Facilitator (or in this case, cat-herder) of the unruly, noisy and opinionated group (meaning typical journalists) was Chris Satullo, a consultant with the News Commons who had a distinguished journalism career in newspapers and radio.

     Chris asked us what our hopes and fears for local news were and, naturally, the demonstrated unwillingness on the part of the public to pay for news came up. Frequently. Loudly.

    Other fears are that we have become a click-bait-driven world. We are more interested in cat videos (ok, well, yeah), quizzes that tell us we are actually Batman or that the person most likely to bail us out of jail is Great Aunt Tillie or recipes for wasabi tequila parfaits than in news.  Well, we aren’t (except for the cat videos), but we are worried that other people are.

    We are also worried that people are losing the ability to distinguish fact from agenda.

    I hear otherwise bright, intelligent, professional people cite “facts” that just aren’t facts. They form an opinion of a political candidate based on a movie made by a director whose only noticeable interest is in blowing things up. They actually read the comments on a Facebook post as if they are fact rather than the ramblings of someone with too much time on his hands. We are bombarded with “agenda” verbiage.

     Unfortunately, much of what is attempting to pass as local news is agenda.  Many people who run hyper-local news sites are hard-working, concerned people who are attempting to cover their municipality while selling ads (which is a lot like selling air) to local businessmen who are overworked and have limited money. But, some are people with a particular political bias who are trying to pass their agendas off as news. And people are buying it.

    That is scary.

    Also scary is the obsession with speed.  Even after news outlets identified the wrong suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing case. Even after news outlets identified the wrong brother as the possible Sandy Hook shooter, they rush to get something, anything, on the air.

    Sure, we all want to be first. But, it’s more important to be right. Speed kills. It kills credibility.

    Another fear was that people are consuming trashier “news.”

    Does that mean we aren’t making real news interesting? Or does it mean people just want trash? Neither is a good thing.

    Adolescent girls always read celebrity news. I remember perusing any magazine featuring Paul McCartney. But, I was in junior high. Today, celebrities have “reality” television shows. And, I’m not sure why most of these people are celebrities. They don’t appear to have any talent. Or to have done anything important. They just are. Weird. And people seem more interested in them than in actual newsmakers.

    Did this group of distinguished journalists actually fix anything? Well, no. But we started a dialogue. And we will continue meeting and talking and supporting real journalism and real journalists.  Because, we have hopes as well as fears.