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.
What I don’t understand is how an NBC can edit a tape of George Zimmerman’s voice, deleting the police question as to the race of the subject (Trayvon Martin), and making Zimmerman’s “He’s black” stand as if Zimmerman were stating it as a reason for suspicion. It would seem that a good lawyer would have Zimmerman owning NBC for the tort of placing in Zimmerman’s mouth meanings which anybody at NBC would cut their own tongues out rather than say in their own voice. On nationwide TV, placing Zimmerman in the position of being in eminent danger any time any black sees him anywhere in the country.The idea that they can get away with that without being sued for their very underwear is astonishing; it is only explicable, IMHO, in the context of the monopoly which wire service journalism (essentially, the AP and its membership) constitutes. I saw on a web site, in a context which made it hard to doubt, that the AP was found in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act by SCOTUS back in 1945 (in a case out of Chicago). With people like Sharpton having blood on their hands (the fire in a NYC men’s clothing store which killed several people) and the Black Panthers being involved, it looks like NBC, the AP, and the rest of journalism would be subject to a RICO lawsuit for triple damages for obliterating George Zimmerman’s reputation as a human being for fun and profit.