firstamendment

Public officials’ love of secrecy is no match for the public’s love to watch government decision-making up close. In California, democratic voyeurism prevails. By Peter Scheer One of California’s more remarkable political inventions is the requirement that lawmakers do their lawmaking in the open for all to see. Call it the people’s entitlement to democratic voyeurism: Members of city councils, county supervisors and school boards (among other local legislative bodies) must not only vote in

An open letter to judges in the BALCO appeal: To learn the identity of the reporters’ confidential source, just ask their lawyer By Peter Scheer Honorable Judges of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit Dear Sirs/Madams: A three-judge panel of this Court will soon consider appeals by the San Francisco Chronicle and two of its reporters from judgments of contempt for refusing to reveal their confidential source for stories about steroid use

Digital Fishwrap Reconsidered By Peter Scheer In a recent commentary published here and on the Op-Ed page of the San Francisco Chronicle (“What if online portals had nothing but ‘digital fish wrap’?”), I argued that large metropolitan newspapers, in order to enhance the value of their editorial content on the internet, should consider delaying the free release of their articles online. Collective action to deprive the internet, temporarily, of free and timely news—leaving Yahoo, Google,

An intriguing idea: Maintaining the value of a besieged commodity by shifting the time frame of its use. Stephen Dubner: Not long ago, we posted here about the supposedly desperate future of newspapers. Now here’s a S.F. Chronicle column by Peter Scheer saying the same thing I tried to say, but Scheer says it better: i.e., if the future of newspapers is so bleak, why are so many smart people rushing to buy them? (The

A cure worse than the disease Dan Gillmor: Peter Scheer . . . asks, “What if online portals had nothing but ‘digital fish wrap’?” He writes: “Newspapers and wire services need to figure out a way, without running afoul of antitrust laws, to agree to embargo their news content from the free Internet for a brief period — say, 24 hours — after it is made available to paying customers. The point is not to