About

CalPotNews.com aggregates news and opinion articles about cannabis, medical marijuana, hemp and related topics with a focus on California. As a former newspaper reporter and editor, I founded the website in November 2009, shortly after losing my last “real” news gig, with two main goals in mind:

1) To develop my expertise in web hosting, multimedia and content management, important skills to have in this age of media fragmentation, and

2) To help educate myself and others about the complex issues surrounding California cannabis, as well as the mainstream media’s track record in covering those issues.

Why pick pot, aka cannabis, as a blog subject? For starters, it’s a fascinating plant with a unique history, especially as its use (and abuse) has literally changed the landscape of California. Medical cannabis remains legally and socially controversial 15 years after California voters passed the Compassionate Use Act, and last year’s Proposition 19 renewed the debate over what criminal penalties — if any — are appropriate for non-medical use and cultivation.

With more statewide ballot initiatives waiting in the wings, and hundreds of city and county ordinances on the books regarding dispensaries and cultivation, medical marijuana isn’t just a story anymore. The story of California cannabis has grown into a mosaic of individual patients, police agencies, local planning and code enforcement officials, collective-dispensaries, elected officials, neighborhood and parents’ groups and cannabis advocates, some of them struggling to find consensus and some pledging to fight to their last breath.

It’s never been a more interesting or more important time to talk about California cannabis, especially in terms of public policy, law and medicine. My hope is that CalPotNews.com will help people do just that.

How to use CalPotNews.com

As a news aggregate source, CalPotNews is subject to peaks and valleys of coverage. Some weeks it seems like everyone’s talking cannabis, others you’ll be lucky to see any stories at all. Keeping track of this halting stream of coverage in real time is a challenge, one that I meet by regular monitoring of Facebook, Twitter and RSS feeds. If all you have time for is an occasional scan of the headlines on CalPotNews, you’ll leave more informed than when you landed here. But there are other options:

Search – The main search box in the CalPotNews header is geared for site search, meaning you’ll get a more selective list of results than if you did a simple Google or Yahoo! Search. That doesn’t mean you’ll get better results, necessarily, as I don’t post every story that’s out there. But if I’m looking for a story from a few months back and I can’t remember all the details, the Search box is where I start.

Categories – There’s a drop-down Categories widget near the bottom of the CalPotNews sidebar. The categories are more descriptive than definitive, and for some posts I assign more than one. If you’re interested in researching a particular subject, however, Categories might work well for you.

Tags – There’s a tag cloud on the sidebar right under the Categories, with the larger words showing tags that have been used most frequently. Most posts have multiple tags, including the geographic location of the story, so this is the place to go if you’re looking for stories from, say, Humboldt County.

About “fair use” and copyright

Sometimes I get asked why I post the full text of the third-party stories featured on CalPotNews.com. It’s not good netiquette, some would say, while others might accuse me of copyright infringement. Heck, I voiced similar complaints about bloggers while I was still working in the newspaper industry.

Today, with a blog or two of my own and the benefit of hindsight, I feel quite differently. If newspapers are guilty of anything, it’s a lemming-like rush to post all their content online in a bid to keep up with the titans of the publishing world. This was the “Field of Dreams” approach to Internet news … build an online audience first, and the online ad revenues will come later. Much, much later, as it turns out, and in much smaller quantities than those generated by traditional print and broadcast advertising.

In the newsroom, concerns about blogging are less focused on newspaper profits than the pure essence of copyright law. (We wrote it, we own it – any questions?) Sometimes it gets even more personal than that, with the writer or photographer getting irked when her work is reposted or repurposed elsewhere. Yet it’s funny how the bloggers get blamed when it’s the media companies that have scrambled for years to give the milk away for free online. Why do publishers and editors get a free pass?

Ironically, bloggers are not only seen as the enemy, they’re also seen as potential recruiters who are useful only for their ability to drive traffic to a particular news site. News companies WANT us to post their stories on Facebook … and give them a big fat “Like” while we’re at it. They practically BEG us to Tweet their links to our friends and co-workers. They’re so confident that their stories will be copied and pasted that they add hidden “Read more” links to their copy. Then they have the gall to complain that their stories are being stolen? Who’s the bigger link whore, the blogger or the newspaper whose content is blast shotgun-style across the Internet with the most advanced social media tools available?

Well, enough of playing the blame game. I’m going to share here how and why I post stories the way I do, and you’re welcome to make of it what you will.

– I post the full content of stories because I believe that’s the only way to preserve the original context of the story itself. This is my judgment as a former editor, and I understand there’s room for disagreement. But if you’re a reporter, ask yourself this: When (not if) your content is going to be referenced in a blog, would you rather your words and your byline be kept intact, or is some half-assed summary of your work and a link good enough? Talk amongst yourselves.

– In most cases, I link to the news source “above the fold” and include the reporter’s name. That standard practice has varied somewhat based on how dense the writing itself is and whether it’s a bylined story or staff report, but I always squeeze the link in there somewhere. So while copyright purists may cringe, the anti-plagiarism crowd can stand down. I don’t pass off others’ work as my own, never have and never will.

Additionally, based on my admittedly limited understanding of copyright law, CalPotNews.com qualifies for a “fair use” exception to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act based on two factors:

“The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes.” As I explained earlier, one main reason I founded CalPotNews.com was to educate myself and others about California cannabis issues. I don’t know whether formal nonprofit status is required, but most blogs (including this one) are nonprofit by default. I would further argue that mine is more educational than most by providing “value-added” aggregation of stories revolving around a central theme. The same basic concept is at work on a worldwide scale at DrugSense’s Media Awareness Project.

“The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.” This one is harder to quantify, but I’m dying to see someone try. My guess is that I send far more links to news organizations than they send to me, and that boost in traffic contributes to their online ad revenues, paltry as they may be. If copyright infringement cases were decided on actual damages to newspapers instead of the DMCA’s hefty fines, we’d be arguing about nickels and dimes, and maybe the quarters I’m saving for laundry.

Legal concepts notwithstanding, newspapers should thank bloggers for giving their brand names and content much wider exposure than otherwise possible. If bloggers don’t follow their preferred click-through or posting strategy, remember that newspapers pay nothing to the people who are doing all the clicking and posting. There is no free lunch, not even on the Internet, and it’s hypocritical to get all pious about copyright when you flaunt your goodies shamelessly and incessantly through social media. If you don’t want to share your content, that’s cool … don’t post it in the first place. Or charge for it, like MediaNews, and good luck with that.

Here’s an even better idea: Try posting content that’s actually worth reading. In the run-up to Proposition 19, the legalization measure on California’s 2010 fall ballot, I expected a flurry of in-depth reporting. It never materialized, and the amount of cannabis news coverage statewide has been pretty darn spotty ever since the election. Part of that is the subject matter – dispensaries in particular are a tough nut to crack for reporters – but I’m thinking that massive newsroom layoffs also play a part.

As a result, most news coverage is pretty routine, a hodge-podge of public process stories about this ordinance or that, plus splashier stories about dispensary raids, CAMP sweeps on forest lands, and the assaults and killings that can be (but most often aren’t) linked to high pot prices and prohibition laws. There has been some modest progress in the two years that I’ve been tracking stories, but most California media outlets still seem to treat cannabis as an add-on to the crime and courts beat.

If editors and reporters would take just a few minutes to scroll through the CalPotNews news feed, maybe they’ll see what I see: Way too many pot puns in leads and headlines and not nearly enough enterprise reporting. If you want to spank me after that, fine, but take a deep breath first. A displaced journalist with a lowly pot blog has to be the least of your worries. Improving the ability of California media to cover cannabis accurately and dispassionately should be the higher priority.

– Michael “Bud” Green
September 2011