Maybe I should start this blog with a disclaimer: This material is the result of both thought and speculation. It should not be taken too seriously nor re-presesented without the author's permission.
When I started thinking about legal issues the sports staff could face, my mind went back to a discussion at the beginning of the semester about the validity of showing various photos of a mother breast feeding in public to poll the audience about what they think is appropriate. Though this isn't a sports issue, it strikes me that what we discussed as an ethical problem could possibly be a legal problem. What if we had shown the mother in a state of -€˜exposure' without her permission? That would be an obvious legal problem. Does the picture violate standards of indecency for a news organization? I don't know.
KUJH-TV sports, because it is a unique combination of both print and broadcast, will face the same legal issues that KUJH-TV news and the Kansan could face. We already saw one example this year of something that could be considered dicey with the headline one student accidentally wrote about Roy Williams. Crediting photos and video correctly is a must to avoid legal hassles, and we successfully navigated that earlier this semester in news by calling to get permission from the city to use their map. Clearly, we can't use what isn't ours without permission. What about something like cursing or vulgarity in fans' signs or in a quote from a sports fan? How do we handle that, and is it considered indecent to show in a video clip? What about shooting and posting video of sports? We probably need press passes and permission for athlete interviews for each sport we cover.
We may not have the immediate answer to all these questions, but the solution is fairly obvious. We need an editor, someone in the "€˜middle management" position, as Professor Musser says, to make some important decisions about what should and shouldn't be posted to the web. I know I've already stressed the importance of a second set of eyes in my rants about the need for copy editing on my personal blog, but we could find ourselves in legal hot water without finding someone to take on this role soon. In the long run, maybe we should consider an attorney to provide legal advice for KUJH-TV when necessary, similar to the Kansan.
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