Despite its having been on the table for at
least six years now, this question of whether bloggers are journalists
won't seem to rest, and now that the courts are getting involved, we don't
have much choice but to revisit it, as Slashdot, among many others, has done today. Dan
Fost's San Francisco Chronicle story provides a good summary of
the issue, as Apple Computer pursues its suit to get some bloggers to
reveal the sources of anonymous information they published. But the article
misses the most basic distinction at work here.
A blogger is someone who uses a certain kind of tool to publish a
certain kind of Web site. The label tells us nothing about how the tool is
used or what is published. We went through this discussion a decade ago,
when people first started asking whether Web sites were journalism. To
understand this, just take the question, "Are bloggers journalists?" and
reframe it in terms of previous generations of tools. "Are telephone
callers journalists?" "Are typewriter users journalists?" "Are mimeograph
operators journalists?" Or, most simply, "Are writers journalists?" Well, duh, sometimes! But sometimes not.
That is the only answer to the "Are bloggers journalists?" question that
makes any sense. Bloggers sometimes engage in journalism, just as they
sometimes engage in diary-writing, art-making, essayizing and many other
forms of communication.
This answer is inconvenient, as we face the question of whether bloggers
should receive the same legal protection as more conventionally defined
journalists; it doesn't provide a clearcut legal rule. But, let's face it,
legal protections for journalists have always involved a certain fuzziness.
Since, thankfully, the U.S. government doesn't legally charter journalists
-- that would be difficult to square with the First Amendment -- everyone
is free to apply the label to themselves. You don't need a journalism
degree, either. (I've been a journalist for three decades and I don't have
one.)
You can try to define journalists by applying the filter of
professionalism, by seeing whether people are actually earning a living
through their journalistic work -- but then you rule out the vast
population of low-paid or non-paid freelance workers, and those who are not
currently making money in their writing but hope to someday. Apparently most of the existing shield laws use some version of the "you are where your paycheck comes from" definition of journalist (see Declan McCullagh over at CNET for more). That's one good reason for thinking that they might need some revision.
There's a good definition of
"journalist" sitting right at the top of Jim Romenesko's journalism
blog today (is pioneering blogger Romenesko a journalist?), where CNN/U.S.
president Jonathan Klein says: "I define a journalist as someone who asks
questions, finds out answers and communicates them to an audience." By that
standard, a hefty proportion of today's bloggers qualify.
Does this vast expansion of the journalism population mean that the
courts and legislatures are going to have second thoughts about protecting the confidentiality of journalists' sources? Perhaps -- and maybe those shield laws need
tweaking or amendment, given the transformations underway. But any attempt
to draw a narrow line around the journalism profession in order to preserve
those laws is doomed to fail. There is no way to draw that line -- income
level? circulation? corporate size? forget it! -- that is not ridiculous on
its face.
So we're left with the pathetic spectacle of beloved Apple Computer
chasing down some bloggers to find out which of its employees leaked some
early peeks at product information. Apple may win, and the laws may contort
themselves to exclude the vast new throngs of online journalists from the
protected club. But is there any doubt that, in the long run, it's Apple's
dam-building effort that's doomed? Whether protected by law or not, the
teeming network of the blogosphere is not going to shut down, any more than
online music file sharing could be ended by the legal campaign against
Napster. In this sense, the whole "journalists or not?" debate is an
irrelevant, backward-looking theological dispute.
[I wrote this post this morning but the computer that I run Radio on died for some reason, so it's going up late, and with some revisions...]
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