Facebook and the media

Much smarter to do that ...

 

I am no longer a reporter ... I am the media relations specialist for the College in question.

I do what I can to assist the media but also to protect the College and its staff, faculty, and students.

My advice to close the page to public access is not dissimilar to Moddy reminding his school's athletes to be aware of what they put out there on their pages.

 

That was also done ...

 

I would advise against using those sites because you cannot always confirm fact on them.
There was a murder in a town near Boston, a 26-year old Greek kid named George Somethingorother who killed his father.
All the Boston papers and news stations used information from a Greek kid from the town's myspace. It was my buddy, who lived in the same down and proudbly displayed his greek heritage on his page.
He was not pleased.

 

Good job protecting the students who posted the picture on Facebook (Blue font included). What was your rationale for recommending the group be made private, which doesn't do much to stop a picture from getting out.

 

We use Facebook/MySpace almost on a daily basis.

 

Wow Moddy, I hadn't heard that story before and that is a mistake of huge proportion. Ouch.

And yet it's so easy to do ... just yesterday someone tagged me on facebook in a group photo, but the gal who is tagged is definitely not me.

 

We lift photos of peoples' MySpace and Facebook all the time if they're public. We'll also find friends of the subject of the story and message them to see if they want to comment in the story. Works great 98 percent of the time.

 

Well that's one problem I don't have to worry about. Facebook is blocked on our Internet setup.

 

I've seen a lot of media grabbing Facebook images and a lot of threads like this discussing whether it is okay.

While we get into the debate of public access, what's the difference between taking a photo from someone's Facebook to print or taking one from a newspaper or photographer's online gallery?

Both are public access, but you'd never take another journalist's photo without permission and likely acknowledgement. Why are Facebook photos any different?

 

Agreed. I say ALWAYS ask for permission.

In case you are wondering, there are two sections on this page dealing with Facebook copyrights, one about the site content and one about user content:

http://www.facebook.com/terms.php?ref=pf

 

Besides the terms of use to Facebook, there are fair use aspects involved as well. Whether lifting a Facebook pic qualifies or not will eventually be decided by the courts, since no one can categorically say what fair use is.