March 12, 2005, 10.10am • 25 comments » • 5,631 Views

Reporters or bloggers, law wants sources revealed

For a timely check on whether the institutions that matter consider blogging journalism (yawn), see the recent case brought by Apple in seeking to force three independent online “reporters” to identify sources they used to report on top-secret forthcoming products.

The individuals had tried to keep hold of their sources’ identity under legal protection designed for journalists.

But now a judge has “ordered [them] to divulge confidential sources, ruling they were not protected by the First Amendment because they published trade secrets”, according to the AP:-

Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge James Kleinberg ruled that no one has the right to publish information that could have been provided only by someone breaking the law.

So that doesn’t quite confront the “are bloggers journalists?” question (yawn) - rather, what’s legal and what’s not - but that doesn’t mean the issue isn’t still problematic.

As Jacob Weisberg wrote in Slate this week:-

If you create a privilege that applies to a group, someone has to decide who belongs and who doesn’t. That’s not so hard in the case of lawyers and doctors, who are credentialed by professional organizations and licensed by the government. But as reporters like to remind one another, they’re joined together in something more like a trade or a craft than a profession. Journalism does not require any specific training, or institutional certification, or organizational membership, or even regular employment.

He was writing on the case of a CIA employee outed by professional reporters for Time and the New York Times.

With the proliferation of new modes of communication online, deciding who is and who isn’t a journalist has become pretty much impossible.

Today, a limitless number of people with no institutional backing can establish themselves as reporters, analysts, or commentators, abide by whatever rules they prefer, find audiences of varying types and sizes, and perhaps even earn a living.

The breakdown of what once were formidable barriers to entry in the field of journalism is good news for democracy as a whole and for the press itself.

Weisberg points out that, whilst journobloggers clamour to be regarded as journalists, when it comes to the prospect of regulation by the Federal Election Commission, they “take the position that they are neither independent media nor partisan advocates, but rather belong to a privileged category called ‘the Internet,’ which government mustn’t tax or touch in any way”.

Either way, these two cases demonstrate that - reporter or blogger - the upshot is the same… without very good reason, you must divulge your sources.