A funny thing happened on the way out the door

I’m not a reporter, generally. I’m not signed up for the Magazine, Newspaper and Online Journalism capstone project at Newhouse. I went in around 9:30 this morning to bone up on my Z1U, and planned to be home before lunch.

The best-laid plans …

I spent most of today doing research for Handshake Magazine (the MNO capstone project) on the federal seizure of seven–no, six–no, nine–websites accused of illegally streaming first-run Hollywood movies and other copyrighted content. I had three Firefox and two Safari windows open, with about 30 tabs each–don’t ask why I used two different browsers at once, I don’t know–tracking down warrants, domain registrations, news items, blog posts and all manner of public record. We called the U.S. Attorney for Southern New York, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, VeriSign and the owner of a new site cloned from one of the sites that got confiscated.

The end result? About 400 words.

My colleague, and fellow “breaking news powerhouse*,” Ana Yanni has all the sordid details over at Adventures of a News Duck.

*Credit for the “breaking news powerhouse” title goes to Matt Doxstad, editor of Handshake.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 1st, 2010 at 10:10 pm. It is filed under journalism, syracuse and tagged with breaking, copyright, federal, hollywood, internet, news, piracy, seizure. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.