The Baltimore Sun | NPPA
Technically, the Sun notes, Baltimore police didn't threaten Scott Cover with arrest over the weekend for videotaping them as they stood on a sidewalk over a handcuffed man. No, they did it because they said he was loitering, and he apparently didn't walk away quickly enough when they told him to leave. (He walked backward, videotaping the entire time.) The incident occurred about a day after the police department instructed its officers not to arrest people simply for photographing or videotaping them. But that new policy also says that people can't violate any laws, such as the ban on loitering. With that exception, the Maryland ACLU says, the new policy really hasn't changed police practices. In a letter to Baltimore police protesting the police interference, NPPA general counsel Mickey Osterreicher writes that Cover wasn't loitering because he wasn't breaking any law or disrupting the peace. (His letter is below.) Something similar has happened in New York, where police have interfered with and arrested photographers even after the police commissioner told them not to. || Related: How journalists can protect themselves & the news they’ve gathered if arrested on the job (Poynter) Correction: This post originally stated that Cover was arrested, but he was only threatened with arrest. (more...)

Alex Pareene
Salon's Alex Pareene riffs on the flap over PolitiFact's fact-check of a claim on "Glee" and the praise Rick Santorum received from Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine. Referring to Megadeth's debut album, "Killing Is My Business...And Business Is Good," he tweeted:

"Without solid numbers, we can't simply can't know how 'good' Mr. Mustaine's killing business actually is. We rate his claim mostly false."

— Alex Pareene (@pareene) February 15, 2012

AllTwitter | Twitter Comms
AllTwitter uses a graphic created by a Twitter employee to show how a regular Twitter user "broke news of Whitney Houston's death an HOUR before the press." Judge for yourself whether the tweet broke much of anything:

Is Whitney Houston really dead? — Brittany J pullard (@BarBeeBritt) February 12, 2012

AllTwitter's Shea Bennett writes of the AP's tweet:

Amazingly, [it was sent] almost a whole hour after the news had first broke on Twitter, with a 1602 PST message from a single user starting a run of activity that saw 2.5 million Whitney Houston-related tweets sent over the next two hours. ... While it’s fair to say that @BarBeeBritt’s tweet didn’t make a huge impact on Twitter – it led to just 3 retweets, after all – the story does appear to have "started" with her on the network.

Rather than showing that anything started with this tweet, I think it shows -- along with the other two early tweets that said Houston had died -- how hard it is for journalists to find early, reliable accounts of newsworthy events. (To be clear, I don't know enough about these Twitter users to know if they were reliable.) That's the problem that researcher Nick Diakopoulos has tried to solve. He and two other researchers created a prototype of a tool that would search for keywords in tweets in order to sniff out eyewitnesses to newsworthy events. (more...)

Associated Press | Meltwater
Six weeks after the AP and other investors launched a licensing organization to collect fees from aggregators, the AP has filed a lawsuit against Meltwater News, which bills itself as "more than a traditional media monitoring service." AP CEO Curley calls it a "parasitic distribution service" that is undercutting AP's business by providing its content to Meltwater clients without paying for it.

The AP says Meltwater is taking its customers — not the newspapers and broadcasters you normally think of as AP clients, and not the average guy scanning Google News at lunch, but those like the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. According to the lawsuit:

The U.S. government is one of AP's largest customers, and AP's subscriber roster includes nearly 100 government agencies — federal, state, local and foreign — including the U.S. Senate, the U.S. State Department, the New York City Police Department, and various foreign embassies. These government subscribers often do not publish the stories themselves, but monitor the news wire to stay apprised of timely, accurate news reports as they develop. ...

AP has lost, and continues to lose, customers to Meltwater over the past several years. For example, the Department of Homeland Security terminated its contract with AP, choosing instead to receive AP content through Meltwater.

(more...)

The New York Times | Scripting News
Two Times stories over the weekend focused on threats to journalists' ability to keep their sources confidential. One of those threats is familiar to journalists: the government. The other is relatively new: Silicon Valley. Both hinge on reporters' increasing reliance on electronic, third-party means of communication. First, the Times' Adam Liptak describes how the U.S. government is increasingly using technological means to ferret out leakers. He writes about the government's case against former CIA agent John C. Kiriakou, who is accused of leaking classified information to journalists about a captured Al Qaeda operative:

The criminal complaint in the case says it is based largely on “e-mails recovered from search warrants served on two e-mail accounts associated with Kiriakou.” ... “The Kiriakou complaint is astonishing,” said [Federation of American Scientists' Steven Aftergood], “because you see the government delving into the innards of the news production process.” Only one of the journalists involved in the Kiriakou case has been publicly identified: Scott Shane of The Times. A spokeswoman for The Times has said that neither the paper nor Mr. Shane had been contacted by investigators or had provided any information to them. The digital trail, it seems, was enough. (more...)

Recent stories about the pending merger between The Bay Citizen and the Center for Investigative Reporting in California have raised the question of whether the merged group would continue to work with The New York Times. The Bay Citizen produces stories for the Times edition in the Bay Area, similar to arrangements between the Times and the Chicago News Cooperative and The Texas Tribune.

Describing Phil Bronstein's presentation to The Bay Citizen's board in January, Peter H. Lewis wrote: (more...)