Definition of a Journalist: The House Gives it a Try

by biverson | August 3, 2007 at 03:52 am

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The House of Representatives Judiciary panel is working on a "federal shield law" ( Free Flow of Information Act of 2007 (Introduced in House) HR 2102 IH ) to protect the press from having to identify sources. The idea is to include traditional journalists and extend the protection to serious bloggers (is that an oxymoron?) and exclude "casual bloggers."

Here is the definition of who would be protected:

The bill defines the practice of journalism as "gathering, preparing, collecting, photographing, recording, writing, editing, reporting or publishing of news or information that concerns local, national or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public."

Journalism organizations support the idea of a shield law and currently 49 states have such laws. This one may sit for some time as Congress will go into summer recess soon.

biverson, thissireally interesting stuff; the question of "who's a journalist" is something that deep thinkers in the journalism community are being forced to wrestle with more and more. Since there isn't any licensing program for journalists (and I don't think there should be), and the Internet's eliminated the printing press bottleneck, the best answer I can think of is...everyone? Trying to differentiate between casual and hard-core bloggers seems doomed to failure to me.

As, like, eighteen billion blogs exist now, it's funny that Congress is just getting around to this, but such is the nature of legislation: critical mass must be reached before they even notice or are willing to go through the process of creating new legislation. I agree with Brian, though, in that stratifying bloggers will be harder than it first seems: we'll obviously have the hardcore online journos on one hand and the LOLcat folks on the other, but the grey area is rather wide. Nice work, biverson.

biverson, it is interesting to watch congress struggle with such a timely and relevant issue...usually they are decades behind on this. there's no doubt that the definition of journalist is evolving - note that no where does it mention that one has to be paid for their efforts inorder to carry the designation. Good Stuff.

Although I am a budding professional in my own field, I am no professional journalist. I am very interested in seeing how this turns out and how it will affect people like me. Good stuff!

I welcome this change because overall it is a step in the right direction, but historically, when big business gets behind something like this, they obviously lobby very hard to have it work in their favor, while smaller indie organizations go along for the ride and hope they won't get shunted into an even more untenable position.

Mainstream news publishers can lobby and create all the legislation they want.

The last communication industry to do so crashed and burned. When MP3 came on the scene Hillary Rosen from the RIAA (Recording Institute of America Association) lobbied congress hard to rewrite legislation, and even though in many respects she succeeded, today, the consumer, regardless of what Sony claims, still has the upper-hand. Rosen also hired IT programmers to create technological roadblocks. Every time they did, hackers busted the code, sometimes even before the "padlock" was an hour old. All she accomplished was to piss off consumers even further.

People are as passionate about news as they are about music, and considering that as people age their interests move from music to news, it should be interesting to see how this evolves over the next couple of years. The same consumers that brought the music industry to it's knees are now discovering news, and they experienced first hand what happens when governments try to protect big business through legislation and IT parlour tricks.

The Canadian government is in the third reading of Bill C-47, a bill that is designed in part to censor people from talking about the 2010 Olympics.

Legislate away. If governments make it hard for average people to report the news we will simply move to servers offshore - just like gambling.

First Flagged at 4:18 AM, Aug 3, 2007 by Brian A Kennedy

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biverson
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