We wanted to start with an online course that would give bloggers a basic education on media law as it applies to blogs to clarify the confusion many bloggers have about things like “fair use” and “defamation”. We did not want to turn bloggers into lawyers but get them to a level where they could at least ask the write questions before doing something dumb. As you will see in a moment, we also wanted to complement that by giving them a way to get answers to those questions.
The media law course serves two purposes for the MBA. First, it advances our “promote, protect, educate” mission by teaching bloggers what they need to know in order to put themselves in the most defensible legal posture in the event of a legal threat. We’d like our members to “win” the case before it is even filed and this course is the best way to advance that notion. Second, we want to expand MBA membership without opening our doors to spammers, con artists and other assorted losers. Under the old system, every application was meticulously reviewed so that as interest to join the MBA went up the rate at which we could approve members went down. Talk about dumb! It became clear over a year ago that we needed a scalable, “no touch” way to process membership requests while still filtering out the knuckleheads. The course is intended to serve that purpose. We figure that having to take an online course in media law and passing a test will be very unappealing to a con artist, spammer or scammer but welcomed by any serious-minded person who recognizes the need to understand the basics of defamation, copyright and privacy laws as they apply to online publishers (bloggers) and online broadcasters (podcasters, vloggers). To that extent, the course serves as a speed bump that we hope will deter the wrong people and encourage the right people to apply.
To put the course together we reached out to the folks at Media/Pro insurance, Harvard Law School and CUNY J School and then brought the whole group to the doorstep of Howard Finberg at News University. This is a key point I want folks to understand. There were some who felt the MBA should have a proprietary course only for our members. I rejected that idea from the outset. Just as we try to keep membership dues as low as possible, just as I speak to every non-profit and educational institution that I can even when I have to pay my own way, just as we are often bending our own rules by helping non-members with legal threats, we wanted this course to be a public good. News University is the perfect. A Poynter Institute project, funded by the Knight Foundation, NewsU can help us make the course widely available to any blogger or other interested party at no charge. Their mission nicely complements our mission. They have a well-honed expertise in turning educational content into on engaging, interactive educational experience. They have many other courses that many of our members would find helpful. In return, by requiring MBA membership applicants to go to NewsU, register with them and take the course on their site, we can help them further their mission by registering (hopefully) many thousands of new students.
The course, Online Media Law: The Basics for Bloggers and Other Online Publishers, was co-authored by David Ardia of the Citizen Media Law Project, which is jointly affiliated with Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Center for Citizen Media and Geanne Rosenberg of the City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism and Baruch College. The assessment section was created by Scott Swift of Media/Professional Insurance and is used to evaluate the student’s understanding of the material and serve as the key criteria for admitting a member applicant.
Although the course is an integral part of the new MBA membership application process, bloggers are not required to join the MBA to take the course. Payment of annual dues for MBA membership is not requested until after the course has been completed and bloggers may opt-out of the application process at any time. After completing the exam, bloggers will be asked to take a course assessment; this exam is a prerequisite for individuals interested in joining the Media Bloggers Association. It is also the basis for the significant discount on liability insurance available to bloggers through the BlogInsure program. Applicants must get a 75 or better to pass the exam but they can go back over the material while taking the test and re-take the test as often as they like so passing the course should not represent a significant barrier for any serious-minded applicant.
