Many readers are probably familiar with the meltdown of the Santa Barbara News-Press, a local daily newspaper in Santa Barbara, California. Starting in 2006, reporters and editors of the newspaper clashed with now-infamous Wendy McCaw, controlling shareholder of Ampersand Publishing LLC, which owns the paper. Tensions swirled around McCaw's perceived intervention in editorial and reporting judgments, traditionally left to the paper's professional staff.

This weekend, the Boston Globe published a thoughtful op-ed by Robert Ambrogi on efforts to reform the Massachusetts open meetings law. Ambrogi points out that the current open meetings law does not provide for civil or criminal penalties against government officials who violate the law.

The Hawaii legislature passed a reporters' shield bill Tuesday that will protect both traditional and non-traditional journalists from compelled disclosure of their confidential sources and information and materials obtained or prepared during the newsgathering process. In one sense, this shield bill is a positive step forward, as it expressly contemplates that online publishers carrying out journalistic functions will take advantage of its protections.

This is the eighth in a series of posts calling attention to topics we cover in the Citizen Media Legal Guide. In this post, we highlight the section on Access to Courts and Court Records, which provides an overview of federal and state laws that grant you the right to access federal and state court records and court proceedings.

Eclipse Aviation, a manufacturer of "affordable" jets, recently sent a subpoena to Google seeking to uncover the identities of 28 users who posted on Eclipse Aviation Critic NG, a blog that Google hosts on its Blogger service.

A federal magistrate judge in New Hampshire has quashed the subpoena issued to Kathleen Seidel. Seidel publishes the blog Neurodiversity, where she writes about autism issues.

Just last week, I was ruminating on the viability of state claims of copyright in government records. At the time, I was pretty confident that a state wouldn't be crazy enough to claim copyright in its own statutes, both because caselaw suggests this would be legally invalid and because it would be shoddy public policy.

Wikileaks, which purports to provide an "uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis," is back in the news as it faces a new legal threat from the Church of Scientology.

We've been following the subpoena issued to Kathleen Seidel in the Citizen Media Law Project's Legal Threats Database, but thought it was time to throw our support behind Seidel and post about this egregious attempt to chill online speech.

A quick update on the Internet Solutions v. Marshall case, which I've blogged about at length previously. This case is significant to us because Tabatha Marshall, the defendant, was the first user of our website to submit information about her case through our threat entry form.