David Adams, a respected voice of conservatism in Kentucky, has announced that he is suspending his involvement with the widely regarded political blog, "Kentucky Progress" to take a position as a consultant with the Rand Paul exploratory committee.
Professional obligations demand my attention this morning. I will blog later. Stay tuned, and thanks.
I am triple booked this morning with hearings scheduled in three counties all between 9 and 10 am. I think I can make two, not three and therefore blogging will continue late morning/early afternoon.
Keep checking back for the latest.
Blogging will be slow today. I am participating as a panel member delivering a seminar to the Kentucky Bar Association annual meeting in Covington Kentucky. The topic "Blogging To The Truth".
Stay tuned.
A blogger in Texas has been jailed for refusing to turn over her computer to a judge. According to several reports, the blogger felt that her personal blog site, on which she had been commenting about persons involved with Anna Nicloe Smith, was a spare time way to express her personal opinions. Then she was sued for defamation.
The judge ordered her to turn over her entire computer and she then claimed it had been stolen. Treating her failure as contempt of court, he put her in jail.
According to a report at arstechnica.com:
Bloggers have increasingly found themselves in hot water for voicing their opinions over the past few years—last year, the University of Washington released a report saying that the number of blogger arrests around the world had tripled since 2006. Media Blogger Association president Robert Cox seems to agree with this general trend, telling the Chronicle that lawsuits against bloggers have more than doubled every year for the past five years. "Bloggers have a tendency to believe myths—like that they are judgment-proof," he said.
Breitbart.com has also added this warning:
"A lot of bloggers think of themselves as individuals or maybe writers but in the courts, they are considered a publisher," Cox said.
His organization has created an on-line course with Harvard Law School, City of New York School of Journalism and News University at the Poynter Institute at Northwestern University to educate bloggers about their legal rights and responsibilities.
"A lot of these cases could have been avoided if things had been worded just a little differently or if they had double sourced their information," Cox said.
"Most of the time, these people are not trained journalists."
The spike in suits is due in part to the burgeoning number of bloggers.
About 175,000 new blogs are created every day according to Technorati, a blog search engine.
Here are a couple of tips for bloggers based upon my training as a lawyer. First, if you are relying upon a source for your information, cite it and give full credit to the report. Second, stay away from accusing people of criminal or immoral conduct. You have more leeway with elected officials, but be careful that you always express such comments as your "opinion" not as facts. And if you do assert matters as facts, you better be able to back them up, and in this regard, two sources are better than one.
On the road to a trial in Louisville this morning. Blogging will be delayed, so please keep checking back.
When Rupert Murdoch speaks, people listen. And they read and they watch. Murdoch is the chairman of News Corp, which owns or holds an ownership interest in a powerful combination of news, entertainment and sports businesses throughout the world.
According to Breitbart.com, Murdoch has offered the opinion that print news is about to be replaced with digital news which will be delivered to a new generation of hand held readers which can provide an entire newspaper, but for a fee.
Discussing the decline in advertising revenue and the current trend to provide access to news for free, Murdoch is reported to have said that this practice is going to have to stop.
The explosion in news related sources on the Internet over the last five years prompted many newspapers to offer access to their main stories and sometimes their entire content to users without charge. However some papers insisted that readers of more than their headlines buy a subscription. Acting on their own they ended up finding themselves a shrinking minority.
The interview with Murdoch followed a secret meeting of newspaper executives to discuss their plight. Watch for a global agreement among them to start charging you, the reader, for access to their content.
When we first reported that a new website had been launched in Kentucky which seemed "hell-bent" on hammering Trey Grayson, the web address, Turncoattrey.com was open to the public.
A loyal reader of the BluegrassBulletin just sent me a private message and told me to go take a look at the changes to the Turncoat site. Sure enough, the site is now only available to those who sign up and provide some personal information.
Sounds like somebody is trying to collect a bunch of IP and email addresses and link them together. Pretty lame.
Professional obligations will have my full attention until afternoon. Oh well, it's really a pretty slow news day so far anyway. By saying that however I expect a major story or two will now develop around noon.
Stay tuned.
THIS PROJECT
