Our Center is representing the creator of fedexfurniture.com, who built furniture for his house out of fedex boxes, and created the website to show others "it's ok to be ghetto." You've really got to see it to believe it! Fedex lawyers threatened legal action, we responded . The most outrage Fedex action was to have the site taken down under the DMCA, even though they have no valid DMCA claims.
There's been a fair amount of press. But the most interesting was a posting at Musings from POP! Public Relations by blogger Jeremy Pepper who spoke with Sandra Munoz from corporate communications at FedEx and posted on his blog all *353 words in 6 paragraphs* of her statement. This guy got fedex on the record-- not a sound bite, or edited one liner, but a thoughtful response-- and he posted all of it. Then he cut and paste his *entire* IM interview of Jose into the entry.
This is where citizen journalism can shine. An individual called a company, got a statement and posted it in its entirety. He then IM'd another party, asked some questions, and posted that in its entirety. He left it to his readers to put this piece together with the other bits of the story --from the fedexfurniture website, other news sources, other bloggers-- and decide for themselves what they think. Not print one line from the responses that jeremy feels is the most important.
I think this fits with my argument that a lot of what's being debated as 'journalism or not' online is really about sources getting their story out without traditional media intermediaries. Pepper says: I blog, you decide. A nice tag line for citizen journalism...