Posted on 05/08/2012 3:35:15 PM PDT by Admin Moderator
We can’t rely on the media, even the alternative media. Free Republic is announcing a new initiative that gives you a platform. We want to leverage the most powerful minds on the right to make a difference. To do this, we want to bring a new level of activism, the citizen investigator. In the spirit of 1750’s The Pennsylvania Gazette published by Ben Franklin and of Andrew Breitbart.
For the longest time, our primary focus has been on looking at what the media presents and investigating it or discussing it. We have been missing something, YOU!
Jim has created a new news category, “FReeper Editorial” (freepered) for you to post your investigative reports. We are working on getting this promoted to a sidebar and other ways to promote your work but here are the basics.
No longer will quality vanities posted in this topic be frowned upon. Free Republic needs to become about you. We are tired of waiting for the media to come around to us, it is time we take our many, many members and become an army. What was once was your vanity is now your megaphone.
To do this right, we need your help. Initially, we are trying to have this as a smooth launch, and creating the new news category is a baby step towards something big. We ask just a few things.
Stay tuned for more change, enhancements, and opportunities that go along with this. - Your friendly neighborhood Mod Squad with blessings of the big dog himself. We are not quite legion, but we are a bag of kittens.
Love it. Finally FR grants serious conservatives with research or knowledge or ideas equality with MSM article posts!
These are not “vanities.”. This is conservative activism. Let’s roll.
How about this?
We let the same ‘rules’ govern all threads (well... except for the Smoky Backroom).
And let PEER REVIEW determine a thread’s success.
And let the Viking Kitties ZOT any bogus entries.
And no whining if YOUR THREAD is removed.
Well, you know my opinion regarding people who cannot stomach frank talk.
Awesome! Freepers rule!
Not good. In this day and age the moment you hit post, google has got it, and it will never go away.It will come back and haunt you.
Amen.
I have two investigative pieces I wrote 8 years ago that apply today. I may have to dust those off.
Thank you Jim.
To know that there is at least one other MAN out there that will put his name on it, and makes that stand, really means now that there are 2!
I include Laz on this, not to speak specifically for him, but in a comparison study (I laugh), I would make that 3.
I’ll see your 2 and raise you 9 chapters from my ongoing book project ;)
Better here than buried in an E-book.
“Thinking Critically”
Doublespeak, Magical Thinking and the lack of critical thought that led us down the rabbit hole
This is so right on that you would be the catalyst for the change. Long time freepers rock. Now to find your article.
You sure are trying to get my goat recently. How about taking me off your ping preferences. Not interested.
If I’m posting on this sidebar, I would have no problem putting my real name on it.
I’m eager to see your work, Norm.
bump for later
Ok jim, you answered me and I answered you back. You have pinged me a dozen times today, Would you rather say someone had intimate relation, or do you prefer they hooked up and had a good $%@ck. I f you are going to present these artcles to the public as a product of FR, a conservative website, I think you should reconsider. If not, it would make us no better than a supermarket tabloid or even a faction of the westboro church.
I can freepmail you the roughs I have so far if you like. The main problem in writing it is that daily, there are more ludicrous examples coming out of the MSM and DC than what I have already written and used for examples. ;)
Just a few tweaks and it’s doable as an ongoing article series though.
{This really is just for news articles that would be breaking news worthy.
NOT for religion, history, UFOs, philosophy, pets, midgets, ponies, or jokes.}
BOOKMARK
I think people agree with you, if this is a serious-journalism effort, we don't go nuts with cussin', obviously. But .... why are you pokin' JR? You're gonna earn a time out or something!
bump
I have not posted in 2 days after sunday night fiasco. The title of this thread is WE ARE THE FREE REPUBLIC, Please give us ideas and suggestions it said, when we do, it is met with high resistence. Are we or are we not THE FREEREPUBLIC! You figure it out. I have tried to wrap my head around what is going on. I gave this article high praise, and now I am the bad guy for offering a decent suggestion?
LOL
I will not say what I was gonna say Laz.
But you can add me to your list.
Lugar’s gone and FR is going journalistic.
Finally, some good news for our Republic!! :)
Media Creates New Palin Scandal! Sarah Accused of Bringing Hairdresser on Haiti Trip
AP photo and caption preserved at Newsbusters.
You’re just on the outs now. Lay low, it will pass. You know yer my pal.
You are another of the Rock Star posters here. Please be a regular contributor!!!
Norm, I think you and I are thinking along the same lines. Analysis of political speech (NLP) viral and ambush marketing, virtual flashmobs, etc. I wrote about this four years before Obammy came on the scene.
Agreed. We all know there are people here using anonymous screen names who are significant players in the conservative world. Some of them cannot identify themselves publicly and for others it would not be prudent to do so.
However, there is a significant amount of clout here in our “crowdsourcing” community and Free Republic could quite realistically fill a role that RedState, TownHall, and others are filling now.
Don't take that as criticism of those forums. I have accounts on them as well, in one case probably going back several years before I registered on Free Republic in 2006 (though I'd been reading FR before that). I almost never post comments on those other forums, though I read a lot, and I believe this is an additional opportunity for Free Republic to grow its readership as well as its service to readers.
Exposure By Free Republic Forces Huffington Post to Pull Article Threatening Glenn Beck
It blows my mind that people accept the most insane statements and actions at face value today. No thought at all goes into analyzing them. But then again, when the govt changed the curriculum (by design) to exclude things like critical thought/’how’ to think’ and the media abandoned the 5W’s of Journalism in their reporting, the world we live in is the only possible outcome.
Free Republic Victory: Vile Palin Sex Slur Comic Withdraws From Elite Media Dinner
BTTT
Awww. Thanks! And can’t wait to see your new entries!
We need to bring FReeper LS in on the conversation. This is right up his ally.
Beaker Eeker?
Actually the Free Republic has been becoming less relevant to me over the past couple of years.
It’s simply the “my way or the highway” attitude. My views are pretty much “Freeper Standard”, what I was uncomfortable with, was others being forced out.
Is this new initiative a sign of a more open Free Republic, or simply more open along a pre-anointed path?
Lets keep this very high quality, I sometimes cringe at what I see at other news "outlets", yes, mostly those smaller "conservative" ones.
Congressman Billybob would have been proud....
I like it! As we in the TEA Party movement have made huge strides up here in Western New York but no one really reports on it, they ignore us.
We have events, candidates, open candidate forums, protests etc.... I personally have unearthed mounds of information around the corruption in New York State government in Albany that stretches to the small communities.
This is a great idea!!
Yep. Sarah Palin has a lot of folks looking out for her on FR.
Bump for later
FYI
UPS requires photo ID now. . .that's news to me.
I think your comment suggests a new category....a concise "reference thread" for collecting information that is relevant to conservative issues. Large threads with lots of comments are interesting if one has the time to spend, but a reference thread could be short enough to read through, and only then add information that is missing (i.e. not the normal comment format where anything goes).
Your suggestion of a thread listing all instances where photo ID is required is relevant to the voter ID issue. A thread to list all instances of where we are taxed would be useful.
An example of a reference thread would be the copyright list thread (although it is over 700 replies now).
bump
I’ve done a LOT of animal rights/environmentalism stuff in the last few years.
Jim, I've already said this is a great idea. I'm pinging this to Onyx and Kristinn due to their longstanding roles in Free Republic, and since I've seen their comments already on this thread.
I do, however, want to echo the comments from RicocheT and others — libel is serious business. Once people move out of the realm of opinion and start reporting, many of the legal protections that apply to “fair comment and criticism” no longer are in play.
Reporting isn't rocket science, but there are rules, and the consequences of breaking them include legal bills which can be devastating.
I believe the requirement that people have some level of prior approval to start posts in this new section may be critical, not only for quality reasons but also for legal reasons. By requiring some level of prior approval, you can avoid somebody deliberately posting libel to get you sued. On the other hand, there are also legal implications involved once you start approving specific articles or approving specific people to post articles, as opposed to being a largely unmoderated forum — but you already know that from the long-ago lawsuit on copyright issues.
Jim, I'm assuming you have an attorney on some sort of volunteer retainer system and lots of legal advice already went into this. California law will be key and I have no idea what specific land mines may be out there in your local legal environment. That's what lawyers get paid to know.
I do know this is a great idea and I'd love to see it go full speed ahead — just as long as it doesn't hit a land mine that blows up Free Republic.
Here are some general principles which apply across the board regardless of jurisdiction which I routinely give to freelancers and new reporters who don't have formal journalism training. Unfortunately, I sometimes have to retrain people on the basics if their focus in the past has been on fluffy features rather than hard news. An even worse problem is that sometimes reporters had a bad editor who didn't understand basics of libel law and let people get away without basic fact-checking, or (more commonly in small newspapers) had an overcautious editor who was more afraid than he needed to be.
None of what follows will be new to anyone with any significant experience in full-time or regular freelance reporting for a well-edited daily newspaper. Most of this is basic entry-level J-school stuff. However, not all newspapers are well-edited, some journalism professors aren't doing their jobs, and today there are lots of people out in cyberspace who don't understand that there's a massive difference between posting opinions as a comment on an article and doing original reporting.
This is a complex and continually evolving area of law, but the short version of the difference is that truth is an absolute defense against libel based on the First Amendment. It makes no difference how hard you hammer someone, or what your motives are, provided that you can prove your facts are right. Also, for the last century since the “Cherry Sisters” vaudeville play review case, opinions which cannot be proved true or false are almost always okay no matter how severe the terms of criticism. (Of course, any facts stated in an opinion piece have to be true.)
In addition, for reporting as opposed to commentary, in the last few decades since New York Times v Sullivan there have been pretty substantial protections for people writing about public officials, public figures, and limited public figures. Those are categories of people who, unlike the average citizen, have effective means to fight back against media abuse, or in the case of elected officials, are people who should not be allowed to use the courts to harass those who are trying to hold them accountable for proper performance of their public duties. If the reporter makes an honest mistake covering an elected official or candidate at a political event, he'll probably be okay as long as the mistake is immediately corrected and the courts don't find that he acted with actual malice and reckless disregard for the truth.
Where things get really nasty is when people writing an article 1) make a false statement against someone who the courts decide is a private figure, or 2) fail to use basic standards of fact-checking to the point that they and the newspaper for which they wrote can be reasonably accused of “reckless disregard for the truth.” That last item is where the “citizen reporter” issues get **REALLY** nasty. Editors and journalism schools exist for good reasons, and teaching people how to spot errors and do fact-checking are among the most important of those reasons.
We all know that mainstream media sometimes make horrible mistakes, and due to huge cutbacks in the editorial staffs, those mistakes are becoming more common.
That's not the point. The point is that a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch who screws up has a corporate lawyer backing him up because the newspaper knows it needs to be willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars to avoid losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in a libel lawsuit. The result is libel lawsuits are rarely filed against major newspapers even when they make major mistakes, and when they are filed, they're usually settled out of court if the reporter obviously blew it.
Small print newspapers can't afford that and need to practice defensive journalism, and the same is true for almost all internet operations except the very largest.
The good thing is that new technology helps prove an honest reporter was telling the truth, so some cases which years ago would have gone to the jury now can be thrown out of court by a judge or never filed at all. It is much harder today than it once was for a wealthy and abusive person in a position of power to abuse a newspaper if the reporter's lawyer can play a tape back to the judge and ask that the case be dismissed since the person filing the lawsuit was obviously quoted correctly.
Two basic reporting tools that in the modern world are both simple and effective include carrying a recorder and digital camera to **ANY** meeting where you plan to report, being **ABSOLUTELY** sure to verify every quote you print with the tape, and having photographic documentation available when relevant. It should go without saying that keeping documents is critical. File folders and big file cabinets are your friend. Becoming a pack rat prevents becoming poorer than a church mouse after getting sued and not being able to prove what you wrote was true.
As I've told reporters working under me or with me for many years — think before you write, ask if you can defend yourself on the witness stand if challenged on what you've written, and make sure to document everything you'd want to know if you were a member of a jury trying your case.
Bottom line: if you don't think like a lawyer, sooner or later you're going to be hiring a lawyer to defend yourself.
Well, they’re not reporting as “reporters.” They’re posting their own opinions or interpretations. That’s why I labeled it “FReeper Editorial.” Was originally thinking of “FReeper OP-ED” but that didn’t really fit either as FR does not have its own editorial page or editorial staff. No news staff either. All such non-sourced posts are actually individual opinions or as one poster labeled his own post, an individual editorial, ie, FReeper Editorial.
Excellent Idea!
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