When the MBA was founded in 2004, we figured it would be a very small group of bloggers who would help each other out if one of us were subject to a legal threat. The threats at the time were coming from media companies and often directed at bloggers who wrote about the media hence the name “Media Bloggers”. That changed pretty quickly and soon we had lots of bloggers who did not write about the media as members but we had already had t-shirts printed up and no one could agree on a better name so we just kept it. Now we just take it to mean folks who use their blog as a form of media as opposed to a personal diary. Bottom line; don’t get hung up on the name. McDonald’s and Mercedes don’t mean much either; you invest a name with value not the other way around. I will give some history later but let’s get back to the big news today!
This weekend, at the BlogWorld and New Media Expo in Las Vegas the Media Bloggers Association will formally announce a comprehensive program to provide bloggers access to the same sort of legal and financial resources long available to traditional media organizations including BlogInsure, a first of its kind a liability insurance program for bloggers which provides coverage for all forms of defamation, invasion of privacy and copyright infringement or similar allegations arising out of blogging activities. The cornerstone of the new program, which we have taken to calling “MBA 2.0”, is an online course in media law developed by the Media Bloggers Association in partnership with The Poynter Institute’s News University.
This new program took about two years to put together and is the result of a lot of work by a lot of people. I cannot do it justice so let’s just put it this way, creating a brand new insurance product with a major insurance company, registering the product with a state insurance commissioner, setting up a nonprofit, and all the other legal stuff that is involved it a huge undertaking. Developing a scaled down version of a course on media law with case studies is no small thing either. And integrating the insurance, the course, the legal services, the e-commerce pieces and wrapping all that up in the new MBA application process was an incredible amount of work.
I want to make special note of the work of Alex Yuriev of Zubr Communications who gave up many nights of sleep to make all the moving parts play nice. Also, Leslie, Vicki, Howard, Casey, Sandeep, Dale, Blaine, Karen, Leib, Ron, Sarah, David, Geanne, and everyone else who helped make this happen.
All this work has been the reason why the MBA has been keeping a low profile. We did not want to encourage anyone to join the MBA until we had the entire program sorted out. As some of you know that came back to bite us in June when our work on the Associated Press – Drudge Retort Copyright case got into the news and led to a great deal of misinformation about the MBA. Our web site was in transition, had not been updated and a lot of things were still half-baked. Rather than address it all let me just note that the dopes lke Michael Arrington, Kos, Nick Denton, Theresa Nielsen-whatever her name is and the other assorted jokers who wrote all sorts of dismissive things about me and the MBA knew close to nothing about the facts of the case (I was one of handful of people to see all the legal documents in the case so believe me they were way off base) and even less about the MBA. Consider this email my reply to their calumnies. We did exactly what we said we would do in the AP case – got to resolution on behalf of the blogger – and we are doing exactly what we said we were doing in launching this new program on 9/19.
