Free speech in peril in Paris, Texas

A ruling today by a judge in Paris, Texas looks to me like it could have serious ramifications for the First Amendment rights of bloggers and whistleblowers. I first read about the case of The-Paris-site in this article by R. G. Ratcliffe (thanks for the onpass, Willie!): AUSTIN — Paris, Texas, population 26,490, has become [...]

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Beaver redemption

I had a delightful conversation yesterday with Don Wasek, co-owner of Buc-ee’s, and an acknowledged novice blogger. “I am new at this,” he said in an email responding to my complaint that the Buc-ee’s blog had lifted my words. Then he asked if he could call me for some advice. We chatted on the phone [...]

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The dam beaver stole my words

I’ve been doing this journalism gig for a good while now, and never before have I had to take on an imaginary beaver for a very real case of plagiarism. But Buc-ee’s gone and done it now. He stole the words right off of my blog and stacked them over here. If the beaver had [...]

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Hey, check this out!

The Project for Excellence in Journalism just released a nice summary of the content on user-driven news sites Reddit, Digg and Del.icio.us, but I think the authors of the report missed the point. The report found little or no overlap between the stories that were pushed to the top of the page on the user-driven [...]

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9/11 again

Thanks to my dear friend, colleague and adopted sister, Holly Hegeman, who saved and republished on her blog today the words I wrote when I was an editor at TheStreet.com to describe that awful September morning: At 8:26 a.m. I sent an Instant Message to our market columnist, Bill Meehan, asking if he’d be sending [...]

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Dead tree dinosaurs and the fabulous future of the news bidness

I once said that I left newspapers in the late 1990s because I didn’t want to be encased in amber. That’s cold, I know, but true. I’ve worked for more than my share of “former” newspapers. And at the surviving papers today, I’m seeing many bosses do the blame game and have ugly public panic [...]

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