I just finished listening to Karl Susman on Sound Policy with Denise Howell. A worrying trend that Karl points out is that homeowner’s claims related to blogging liability were being paid out for some time, and now there aren’t any being paid out. As an insurance agent, his take on this is that blogging, podcasting, and other online participation are no longer covered by homeowner’s policies. Of course, there are now some custom policies available for bloggers.
Earlier in the cast, he mentioned that blogging and related activities are also entering into corporate policy negotiations. Most of the corporate liability policies he’s working on (in CA) explicitly do not cover liability related to online publishing activities—or offering very minimal coverage.
I know an insurance agent has a distinct bias in terms of identify the need for more and more coverage, but it somewhat shocking to me to hear that the common liability insurance we depend on—our corporate liability policies and our personal homeowners’ policies—may leave us out of luck when it comes to our online publishing activities.
Journalism and insurance
As a sometimes professional but always citizen journalist I’ve seen a number of policies lately that exclude journalists which is hard when the line of who is a “journalist” gets blurred.
Submitted by Anonymous
on Thu, 11/06/2008 - 3:15pm