12/13/2012 Notice

ATTENTION JOURNALISTS AND LAWYERS:

We have three sections of special interest to lawyers and Journalists. We seek your feed back in helping us develop these pages so that they serve your needs better.

JOURNALISTS:

 THE NEWS SERVICE contains three features at present. First we have our original feature which reflects our original intention, the "reading room". Here both journalists and the general public may link into most of the important maritime news sources and trade journals of the English speaking world. A sample link is below for the weekly THE WATERWAYS JOURNAL


THE WATERWAYS JOURNAL: The River Towing Industry's Weekly   .

Once called the "River man's Bible" the Waterways Journal is a black and white weekly available for a very moderate subscription price with a daily on line free service. The Journal is the best available coverage of issues and events affecting the river and canal towing services in the United States and also has some wonderful occasional historic features and news of the inland excursion and ferry services. More over this is the best coverage of our inland navigational infrastructure such as locks and dams, aids to navigation, and channel maintenance.

http://www.waterwaysjournal.net/

The maritime media links are followed by our HEADLINE SERVICE. In the HEADLINE service we try to draw attention to stories we think are exceptionally important and provide hyperlinks to commercial media coverage , often foreign English language news sources. We don't pretend to have a news staff. Our staff are members of such organizations as the Naval Intelligence Professionals, the National Mariners Association, The Masters Mates and Pilots International, and the Naval Institute and routinely monitor these organizations for topics and news stories that seem "to have legs". Then they look for a link-able source, post a head line and the link. If you are a non maritime reporter assigned the occasional maritime story our service may be as close to a real screening system as you'll get for maritime stories. After keeping the selected headlines up a month we cull them again and shift the ones with the most durability to our RETAINED HEADLINE SERVICE. Stories in the Retained Headline Service are kept for at least 90 days.

 One area where we would really appreciate receiving comments is Our Retained Headline Service we are coming up on one year of publishing the NEWS SERVICE. Space is limited. We could use suggestions on archiving. How do we judge what to keep indefinitely? In terms of professional journalism what is the time range on "indefinitely'? When we decided to start this service which we intended as an encyclopedic service on maritime publications and subjects we decided to start as a blog , to make our mistakes in public, and solicit our various "publics" for feed back and suggestions. Tell us how we can improve the service for you.

Our news service has the potential to be a great resource for the professional journalists. . If you are following a maritime legal story you may find our two maritime law related sections "ADMIRALTY LAW" and AUTHORITATIVE LITERATURE helpful as well.

LAWYERS:

 Check out our ADMIRALTY LAW SECTION. In the admiralty law section you will find a short description of the difference between "admiralty" and "maritime law", book reviews of many useful books on maritime and admiralty law, and links to useful legal research sites specifically related to admiralty. You can look up regulations and statutes without leaving the site and link into WESTLAW and use your WESTLAW account to continue research without having to log out of our site.

 You may find our "AUTHORITATIVE LITERATURE section most useful when dealing with expert witnesses. There are few book reviews in this section but here you can learn about sources for regulations, codes, and standards, and authoritative literature that can assist you in combating nautical "junk science" when you encounter it in the court room. In this section you will find information on the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) a source of many useful "standards" on many marine operations. You will also find retail sources for the many "GUIDES" and "COMMENTATORS" of the American Admiralty Bureau, and a slowly growing number of reprints of AAB publications available for free on the site. Our explanation of what makes a particular publication "authoritative" can help in the battle against "useful language" twisting into adversarial service quotes from publications that don't qualify as "authoritative". This section is poised for a great deal of growth in the upcoming year. We would appreciate your comments on changes and additions that we can make to make this section of more utility to you in your practice.