Intellectual Property Law

LAMP event

By Susan Crawford

Yale Law School had its inaugural Law & Media Program event this afternoon. There was a print investigative editor and his lawyer (Jeff Leen, Investigations Editor, The Washington Post; and Eric Lieberman, Vice President and General Counsel, The Washington Post) and a broadcast investigative reporter and his lawyer (Brian Ross, Chief Investigative Correspondent, ABC News; John Zucker, Senior Vice-President, Law & Regulation, ABC News).

The internet just barely came into view at the tail end of the panel discussion. Wildly paraphrasing:

Q. Does the existence of the internet put pressure on the investigative reporting process?

A. [Brian Ross]: Naah! Drudge doesn’t have our resources. Sure, if we hear that the Washington Post or the New York Times is following a story, we’ll pick up the pace. But otherwise - no pressure! The internet provides us with a great alternative distribution channel for our work.

A. [John Zucker, Brian’s lawyer]: Well, actually, online stories have a very different cycle than the regular evening news. Stories break at all hours of the day and night, and the online people want to get stuff up when they think there will be spikes in viewing. This puts tremendous pressure on our ability to do the lawyering job we need to do.

Otherwise, the (very good) discussion was about traditional investigative reporting. Jeff Leen is obviously thoroughly dogged, professional, careful, and respectful of the legal advice he gets from Eric Lieberman. Leen spends years guiding teams of investigative reporters on individual stories, and he’s very clear on what is appropriate behavior for reporters. Brian Ross (on the other hand) was clearly feeling feisty, and mentioned a few times that he has had a lot of tussles with Zucker. The use of confidential sources seemed to create tension for the ABC team - in particular, the exclusive use of such sources.

This afternoon I certainly felt the presence of the journalistic priesthood, but in this context the bond seemed justifiable. This kind of sustained investigative work (particularly on the print side) takes years, enormous resources, and real care in reviewing documents - all of this can, of course, be done by purely-online actors, but the institutional commitment of the Washington Post to investigative reporting is not something to disdain. To the contrary - it’s impressive, seemingly central to the paper’s overall mission, carefully curated and edited, and worth celebrating and supporting. Let’s say five great English-language newspapers survive the onslaught of the internet model. The Post should be one of them - we all need their investigative work.

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and in telecom news, a downward note: the Commission has denied Skype’s petition. Comment by Public Knowledge is here; background is here.

Full post as published by Susan Crawford Blog on April 01, 2008 (boomark / email).