When we started this exercise, aka blogging, we wanted to keep a running tab of “things” we care about as they showed up in various news sources, and to comment on those topics as often as we could share relevant examples from our own daily activities. Community, collaboration and conservation have been the catch-all topical themes.

Depending on the news for this exercise, not surprisingly we care about the state of the news in all its business/profession dimensions. We have a particular fondness for long form written journalism, and a particular loathing for its polar opposite, whatever that might be called. Gossip-mongering, ugh. So when I first saw headlines announcing that a gossip-mongerer had suffered a legal defeat last week, I smiled at the headline but could not otherwise be bothered to read the details. That changed dramatically when I read the short item below:

How Peter Thiel’s Gawker Battle Could Open a War Against the Press

BY NICHOLAS LEMANN

Probably the most important case in American press law is New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964), in which the Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, made it just about impossible for a “public figure” to win a lawsuit against a news organization. Justice William Brennan, in the majority opinion, wrote, “The constitutional guarantees require, we think, a Federal rule that prohibits a public offi­cial from recovering damages for a defamatory falsehood re­lating to his official conduct unless he proves that the state­ment was made with ‘actual malice’—that is, with knowl­edge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” This standard, built on in succeeding cases, made this the country with the most pro-free expression, and specifically pro-press, laws in the developed world; post-Sullivan protections extend from publications to individuals, and from libel to invasion of privacy. “Libel tourism” means looking for a pretext to sue an American publication in England or some other friendlier venue, especially if you’re a celebrity. Conversely, the purveyors of recent monster revelations, like Wikileaks, have taken pains to find American publishing partners, because the right to publish is far more substantial here than elsewhere. Continue reading →