MBA Legal Initiative Update: Tulsa World v. Batesline Case
Since the MBA took up the defense of MBA Member Michael Bates in February there has been no further communication by the Tulsa World with Michael Bates or MBA General Counsel Ronald Coleman of Coleman & Associates in the matter of Tulsa World v. Bateline.
Since receiving the letter sent by Coleman which categorically rejected the claims against Bates and his blog, Bateline.com, the Tulsa World has taken action to address one of the issues raised in its threat letter. The Tulsa World had claimed that Bates was improperly linking to material on the Tulsa World web site. Bates tells the MBA that "the World has now put more content behind its subscription firewall, content which was previously freely accessible to the public: PDFs of the printed newspaper, the wireless section (a daily selection of stories with simplified HTML for reading on a wireless device), and even the section headline pages."
The readership of Batesline skyrocketed after Bates published the threat letter he received from the Tulsa World. The site which had been receiving less than a thousand readers a day. Today it received between 1600-1900 visitors a day. Peak traffic was 17,000 visitors the day Instapundit and other top bloggers linked to the threat letter. The site was ranked around 2000th (an "Adorable Little Rodent" in the TTLB ecosystem) but went to a peak of 178th at the height of attention to the controversy, and is now settle in among the top 500 (a "Large Mammal").
Bateslines was not alone as a target of the Tulsa World. TulsaNow (tulsanow.org), a non-profit organization interested in civic dialogue, received an almost-identical threat letter from Mr. Bair of the World. Two other websites were threatened. City Councilor Chris Medlock runs MedBlog as part of his Chris Medlock site. Tulsans for Election Integrity moved to a new host after their old host threatened disconnection, and the organization chose to remove links and quotes, although they did not respond to the World's letter.
