Okay a little backstory, I had a midnight idea to create an online news site, lets call it newsbyyou*.something or another. My boss liked the idea so he started to get it created. It is set up something like this.
PersonA lives in Somecity, Somestate and an interesting news story happens the send in a report, not AP nor another news source report but a report they did themselves.
The story is posted, and the reporter gets all income generated by the google ads etc on the page they submitted.
Now for the questions.
What kind of laws can be broken if a submitted story is false? Even if we have an editor person in-house work to verify the story and sources and delete it if we find it flakey?
What kind of information should we require from a submitted story, sources and what else?
What other kind of pitfalls should we be aware of, legal or otherwise before we go live?
*Not a real name just made up to give an idea of the project.
We have, and I have the documents of the do’s and don’ts but nothing on the
I added the first one, because I do not like having all my eggs answered by one person. I thought asking here I would get a lot of different views, to look into something even further.
Sonds a lot like newsvine.com. Since it is basically the same business model, maybe you could get some basic answers by poking around in their legalese - subject to the two websites’ respective jurisdictions of course.
I disagree. Among other reasons, no one qualified to answer is going to try, because (as has already been said), you are asking for specific, real world
legal advice that’s impossible to competently give over the internet. Also,
odds are high that we’d be practicing law without a license in your state.
You need to either trust your lawyer or (even better) get a second opinion from
a competent attorney licensed in your state, who can meet with you and ask
the necessary questions.