Project: CC for Journalists

We're starting slow with this project, though the current aim is to publish a short guide on copyright and Creative Commons. This will include information on how to request CC licensing as part of an OIA request, referencing NZGOAL. It will also teach journalists how to properly credit CC licensed works (which not all journalists have been great at).

We'll then look to distribute this guide to various journalism schools and conferences, as they arise.

A CC guide for journalists is a good idea. Particularly because as CC changes from version to version, there are sometimes changes to things like attribution requirements, and definition of "NonCommercial", and it's good for people in the industry to have a canonical reference for best practice (although if in doubt, they should get legal advice, or course).

I would recommend including something on the use cases for the various licenses as they apply to journalistic publishing and re-use. For example CC-BY-SA is good for collaborative reference works like SourceWatch. If a company was thinking about applying a CC license to their own magazine or newspaper, CC-BY-NC or CC-NC-SA might be more suitable. On the other hand, if it's a public interest publication by a not-for-profit, and they want the articles to spread as widely as possible, while still getting credit, CC-BY would be the one.

Good idea - it currently holds references to a few CC publications overseas (like The Conversation). It would be good if more publications moved to CC, and I think that sort of consultation should be part of the broader project CC for journalists project.

The more humble goals are to ensure that journalists:
1) know about about copyright and CC;
2) know how to ask for CC licensed works from govt, and the benefits thereof;
3) know about CCANZ's projects, to plant seeds for coverage in the future; and
4) know how to attribute CC works (especially photos), as news publications are often quite bad at this (for example, they attribute 'Creative Commons' rather than the actual creator).

We've just rushed out 200 x 8-page, A5 brochures for the JEANNZ conference tomorrow, which is our conduit to journalism educators in New Zealand. @cathyaronson and I will be attending to spread the word.

We'll publish the guide online shortly - we're just making sure there's nothing we missed in getting this to the printers in time for the conference

The guide is very 'open government' focused, as part of the broader ambition for the guide is to encourage journalists to actively call for openly licensed data and information in OIA requests.

Cathy and I attended the JEANZ conference last week, and distributed about 100 brochures. There was plenty of interest from various educators on CC, so we are hopeful of seeing greater inclusion of CC in journalism education in 2016. We'll be working on that in the first few months of next year.