NPR’s “All Songs Considered” is a show representative of the station’s embracing all things new media. Through digital tools like podcasts and streaming video, and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, the show has gained serious clout with both fans and musicians. While much of NPR’s older audience may stumble upon “All Songs Considered” between radio news programming, the new media tools enable NPR to reach a younger audience. This audience comprised of multiple generations attracts musicians to the show, as they see the potential for new fans and national exposure.

“All Songs Considered” was recently featured in The Washington Post as gaining the reputation of an indie rock tastemaker. Though perhaps not as scientifically sound as other methods, a comparison of the show’s Facebook page to that of other indie music blogs affirms this characterization. Indie music blogs Indie Rock Café and Stereogum respectively have 4,098 and 3,622 “Likes” on their Facebook pages. “All Songs Considered” has 12,839.

Is such a comparison even fair when considering NPR’s advantages? Probably not. Most indie music blogs do not have national radio shows, fully equipped studios, and salaried employees. NPR has clearly learned, though, from how these popular blogs engage an audience. Both Facebook and Twitter enable fans to comment on what songs they love or which new artist should be featured, while web polls allow NPR to track what listeners are enjoying the most. One recent episode of “All Songs Considered” focused on listeners’ picks for the best music of 2010 so far. Fans cast thousands of votes on the NPR Music website.

With “All Songs Considered” embracing a new media model and receiving a good deal of exposure for it, NPR helps to bridge a generational gap between young people and their parents. For those of older generations who do not download podcasts to their iPhone, they may end up reading about “All Songs Considered” and NPR music in The Washington Post or The New York Times (read the New York Times article here). The articles discuss the prominence of the website, podcasts and new iPhone application, so they may put down the paper and go to their children and grandchildren, asking, “How can I download a podcast?”

In this way, the rise of the program represents a recurring cycle in our society today: the new media attracts the traditional media and the traditional media audience is in turn drawn to the new media.

Stay tuned to see whether or not this leads to 20-year olds and their parents listening to the same music.  Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray ….

I wrote last week about the proliferation of the law of libel on the internet, but the same explosion of opportunities for litigation – and risks to would-be publishers – applies via the internet to all forms of speech.  Libel is still libel, but more cases are pushing arguments that speech is conduct that can be sanctioned and criminalized.  And for much the same reasons.

As I wrote:

Because like a lot of things that the internet did not change, it did not change the law of libel.  In terms of what the internet did change, two things in particular are striking: First, the now potentially worldwide audience for anything published.  And second, and sometimes of even more significance, the removal of barriers to entry.  Or put another way: Everyone is a prospective publisher.

Several recent stories vividly illustrate the point, including an article in last Thursday’s New York Times about suicide chat rooms and prominent recent lawsuits in New Jersey and Louisiana involving attempts to “out” the names of anonymous online authors.

The Times reported that a Minnesotan named William F. Melchert-Dinkel was charged with aiding the suicide deaths of a British man in 2005 and a Canadian woman in 2008.   Continue reading

Mirsky & Company is looking to hire an intern. Here’s the type of person we are looking for:

The candidate must be interested in new media and social media and communications.  Our business is a small law firm, so an interest in law is nice, but the individual need not be a lawyer (nor even a law student).

The internship would be paid, and part-time but on a regular weekly basis beginning as soon as possible and continuing into the summer and most likely beyond that into the fall as well.

We are looking for someone to assist with various social media and communications functions for the firm, as well as the more typical research and writing projects and various innovative things we’re trying to do.  We are not really looking for a lawyer because this will not typically be legal work.  We are looking for someone smart but creative, someone obviously looking for some work and to do some innovative things.  We can also tailor the job a bit to the personality of the person who does it, thought we do have some specific needs.

There will definitely be some tedious parts to this, involving boring research and legwork on various projects, but we intend to also make this attractive.

Interested people should please contact Andy Mirsky via the contact points on this site.  Thanks so much!

I recently wrote about the dust-up following the awarding of a Pulitzer for political commentary to online cartoonist Mark Fiore, when it was revealed that Apple had rejected Fiore’s proposed iPhone App several months before Fiore’s Pulitzer fame.  As had been widely reported, Apple subsequently invited Fiore to re-apply, which Fiore promptly did and now, evidently, Fiore’s cartoon app is available for download through the store.

Commentary on the episode leaned heavily to the view of “what gall!” of Apple to presume rights to regulate content.  So, for example, Rob Pegoraro wrote in the Washington Post last week:

If this conduct seems arbitrary, that’s because Apple gives itself that liberty.  The Cupertino, Calif., company’s iPhone developer agreement, as published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says Apple can reject an application “at any time” if it thinks rejection would be “prudent or necessary.” Continue reading

Eric Felten brilliantly skewers the supposed credibility of the online “marketplace of ideas” when he recently wrote last week in the Wall Street Journal:

Spend any time on the Internet and – like the naif in the ‘Casablanca’ gambling room dumbfounded when the wheel comes up 22-black twice in a row – one’s bound to ask, ‘Say, are you sure this place is honest?’

This sort of thing seems oddly hilarious and at the same time naïve in the same way as the fool in Casablanca, in whose defense one could at least say it was a different time.  Last I checked, there was no giant sign over the entrance to the internet saying “tread warily here”, although Felten’s point about the sensitivity of individuals to words being written about them is hardly a new concept.  Just one small point of reference: I handle a fair amount of pre-publication review of publications for libel (i.e. in advance of actual publication), and one thing I usually drill into my publishing clients is being somewhat sensitive to the litigatory likelihood of the person about whom words are being published.

I’m not saying shy away from controversial journalism, and it’s advice that probably did not compel the muckracking vision of Woodward and Bernstein or the “American Century” mantra of Henry Luce.  Nonetheless, don’t ask a libel lawyer for advice unless you’re willing at least to consider whom you’re writing about if one of your goals is simply to avoid getting sued.

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I will be moderating 2 separate panels on Monday and Tuesday at the 2010 Politics Online conference spectacular here in Washington.

The first will be Monday April 19th at 2pm, and called “Is this Barack Obama’s Real Facebook Page? Domains, Twitter Handles, Online Presence – real or fake? Intellectual Property, Cyber Identity, and More!”.  I will be joined on the panel by Jason Torchinsky of Holtzman-Vogel, Matt Sanderson of Caplin & Drysdale and Neal Seth of Baker Hostetler.

The second will be Tuesday April 20th at 10:30am, and called “Laws Affecting Digital Communications – Copyright, Privacy, Elections/FEC, Advertising, Libel, Contract Law, etc.  Rules, Regs, Fines and Community “Standards” Applicable to Communicating in Digital Media.”  On this panel, I will be joined by Jason Torchinsky of Holtzman-Vogel and John Stewart of Crowell & Moring.

Details at polc2010.com/.

“Work Made For Hire”, 17 USC §101: An original, copyright-able work (meaning: a work that falls within the subject matter of copyright protection) qualifies as a “work made for hire” if the work either (1) is created by an employee within the scope of his or her employment or (2) qualifies as “work made for hire” under the established evaluative criteria described below.

Significance of “Work Made for Hire”: The significance of a work being deemed “work made for hire” is that the beneficiary of that designation owns full copyright in the work outright and exclusively.  Thus, as between an employee an employer, the employer owns the copyright to any works created by that employee within the scope of his or her employment.  Likewise for a party contracting for the creation of a work from a non-employee.

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You sell your business for cash plus an amount to be determined based on earnings or other performance measurements of the business over the next 1, 2 or several years after the sale.  This is an “earnout” and can be a very lucrative upside to a seller.  It can also be attractive to a purchaser unable (or unwilling) to fully calculate the value of the business being purchased at the time of sale.

It also has obvious risks, particularly to a seller.  Commonly, the earnout involves a seller who will continue to participate in the business after the sale under some sort of employment or consulting arrangement with the new owners.  This theoretically gives a seller an ability to have some control over the post-closing success of the business, while giving the purchaser a way to incentivize (and control) the seller’s employment or consulting performance.

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Publishers are worried about cookies, specifically talk of regulatory action on the privacy front.  What’s the story here?

A Privacy Policy might typically say something like this:

“A ‘cookie’ is a small text file on your computer’s hard drive that our Web site uses to collect information about how you use our site.  The cookie transmits this information back to our Web site each time you visit a page on our site, thus allowing us to identify our most popular pages, features and data.”

To someone not working for an ad agency or at a publisher or for, say, Google, reading these terms, what they might read could be summarized like this: “Software … embedded in my computer … I have no choice … it stays there forever and ever … it will watch my every move and report back to its masters and possibly the government … my wife might find out.”

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A question came up about the new media activities of 501c3 organizations hosting social media platforms for the public (Thank you to Debbie Miller for her assistance with this research):

Question: Can a 501c3 private foundation or public charity put its tax-exempt status at risk by hosting a social media platform?  Specifically, could the advocacy and electioneering activities of individuals and groups using that social media platform be treated as the direct action – or facilitation of direct action – by that foundation of activities inconsistent with its tax exempt 501(c)(3) status?

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