BusinessWeek: Are Bloggers Journalists? on Yahoo News

[BigBearJohn]

A California judge issued a preliminary ruling on Mar. 3 that three bloggers who published leaked information about an unreleased Apple (NasdaqNM:AAPL - News) product must divulge their confidential sources. If the ruling holds, it will set a precedent certain to reverberate through the blogosphere because this means under the law bloggers aren't considered journalists.


To crack down on internal leaks, Apple has taken legal action against three Web logs: PowerPage, Apple Insider, and ThinkSecret. The sites published information about an unreleased product, code-named Asteroid, that Apple considered a trade secret. According to court papers, the company says the people who run these sites aren't "legitimate members of the press," and therefore it has the right to subpoena information that will reveal which Apple employees are violating their confidentiality agreements. In most cases, journalists are protected under the First Amendment and don't have to reveal their sources.


"BIZARRE AND DANGEROUS STANDARD"? The civil rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represents two of the three sites under fire, says being able to ensure sources' confidentiality is critical to any journalist's ability to acquire information -- and that includes Web diarists, aka bloggers. Says EFF attorney Kevin Bankston: "They're people who gather news, and they do so with the intent to disseminate that news to the public. The only distinction to be made between these people and professional journalists at The New York Times is that they're online only."


So is a blogger a journalist? Certainly, some organizations have begun to legitimize Web logs as a valid grassroots form of journalism. In 2004, bloggers for the first time received press passes to cover the conventions during the Presidential elections. They have broken major news stories. Several prominent bloggers have become media pundits. And mainstream media outfits, including BusinessWeek Online, are developing blogs to complement their traditional outlets. (BusinessWeek Online first reported the judge's tentative ruling in this case Mar. 4 on BW blog Tech Beat.)

More at: http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=66&u=/bw/20050308/bs_bw/tc20050377877tc024&printer=1

[Career Prole]

1. Someone wake me when they ask

"Are journalists still journalists?"
That's the one I wanna see. :eyes:

[BigBearJohn]

2. sad but true