Slashdot Mirror
Is Blogging Journalism?
An anonymous reader writes "In the wake of the judge's refusal to extend journalist protections to Think Secret in its case against Apple, the Net is abuzz with commentaries coming to its defense. MacInTouch points to three of them, from CNET's Declan McCullagh, MP3 Newswire's Richard Menta and grassroots journalism pundit Dan Gillmor. All agree that Apple went too far with its case and question the court's decision that Web journalists don't count."
See Professor Susan Crawford's piece on this on her blog where she argues the outcome (if not the reasoning) of the Judge's ruling was correct... http://scrawford.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2005/ 3/6/404732.html
one word:
"NO"
it is journaling and commentary.
about the same thing as wasting your time reading the letters to the editor.
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
It seems to me that while most people don't research their blogs there are some that do.
The same is true for journalists...most are rather crappy but the precious few that do their job well are those who define their job field.
In this way bloggers are in fact journalists, albeit unpaid, just some are better than others.
Pardon my ignorance, but in traditional journalism, is the confedentiality of a source legally protected if the source is demonstrably breaking the law?
As I understand it, Apple wanted the name of the source because whoever the source was, he or she was breaking trade secret or NDA laws. Would this (outlaw) source's confidentiality normally have been in another medium?
Stupid like a fox!
After all, the blogosphere had more journelistic integrity that Dan Rather, so either the Blogs are Journelism, or Dan Rather isn't. Tough call.
According to CNN , the White House just gave a blogger, Garrett M. Graff (of Fishbowl DC) a press pass. If blogging doesn't count as journalism, it will soon.
The question is not "Is blogging Journalism".
The question is "Is this an instance in which the Shield Law(s) was meant to be applied".
Blogging as journalism is debatable. But it is protected under the first amendment. That part can not be in question. However, protecting sources that reveal confidential information, when there is no public (necessity/safety/whatever word you want in here) as in the case of the Pentagon Papers, Whistleblowing or otherthings, is what this case was really about.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
A blog is an online journal. A journalist is "one who keeps/writes a journal". So how is a TV Anchor more of a "journalist" than a blogger?
8 47784
The spirit of the law is to let the truth get out without compromising the truth-teller's safety / privacy. I think using it to provide insider info that may break NDA's about upcoming products is unfortunate, but we must defend it or else real whistleblowers, such as someone ratting out a pharmaceutical cover-up, will be afraid to tell their story, and the public will get hurt.
I don't agree with the KKK, for an extreme example, but I do agree with their right to speak their minds; and the same goes for thinksecret.com: I think it's sneaky to sell apple's private product info (paid informants, or just ads on the site) and then protect the transaction under the cover of journalism, but to protect other bloggers conveying more vital issues, we must also protect thinksecret.
Similar points raised in http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=141361&cid=11
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You people just won't fucking stop. There is a difference between a journalist protecting his source because
a) the source revealed illegal activities, and may have committed a crime doing so
b) the source revealed legal activities, and did commit a crime in doing so
One deserves protection, the other doesn't. Now, I'll leave you to figure out which is which.
I consider blog writers who don't do much research to be like opinion columnists in a newspaper.
Are opinion columnists considered journalists?
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No, lots and lots and lots of stuff in the New York Times is not important to me. Most of it isn't. I don't care what's new in the Arts world. I don't read the Business section, etc, etc. But I bet the reports who write the articles for those bits did their research and make sure that what they are publishing is correct as far as they can tell from their research. That's what makes it journalism. The professionalism. Not whether I find that bit important or not.
good question. in the scientific world, there's always the "scientific community" who proves, disproves and defend one's finding.
maybe the professional journalists' community should do the same thing.
More to the point, is what the major networks pumping out as news really journalism? Think about that. ;)
but to say "web journalists don't count" also goes too far. It implies that bloggers are all journalists. The blog in question clearly was journalisitic but 99% of the pap on *.blogspot.com is porn, commercials, foaming at the mouth on the politcal and relgious right and mostly self absorbed diarizing...are we protecting that? The so-called blogosphere has way more defamatory, inflamatory, libelous and privacy invading contetent than any print media would get away with and I include buttwipe like the National Enquirer in that. Most of them are read by nearly noone but the authors so there is no big stink... are we protecting that?
I agree with those who think the court doesn't get it because I think that blogging CAN BE simply a lowest-cost-of-entry publishing format, a minor technical distinction exists between that and conventional news media. The caution I suggest is that if we act as if blogging automatically IS journalism then we provide gold settings for all the droppings just becuase they get delivered with the same technology as the diamonds. By intent and content, most blogs don't rate any more protection than a post card, an open piece of first class mail tacked up in public place.
How to make a better distinction between "journalism" and electronic flatulence? The courts should consider [a]who reads it and [b]who writes it or what authority is ascribed to the information. The tricky parts would then just boil down to cases where the author always said "this is just a rumor" but the info was always right on the money.
Oh, and the other 1%? I think I bookmarked all 2000 of them!
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Let's think clearly and logically for just a moment here. I see a lot of argument about the dictionary meaning of "journalism" and whether or not blogs qualify. I don't want to take a position on that. But I do want to take the position that whatever your opinion is about the journalistic purpose or lack thereof with regards to bloggers or a particular blog, it kind of doesn't matter with respect to this story.
Let's not lose sight of the fact that Judges are there to make rulings on matters of law, not to assign value judgements about the worth or societal value or accuracy of a given practice. This isn't a ruling that ThinkSecret isn't "real journalism" or that it's creator isn't a journalist (whatever that means). It's just a legal judgement about whether or not the practices he employs qualify him for protection by certain laws.
I'll even go so far as to make a speculation about what laws were relevant. I'd imagine that TS argued that he could not be compelled to disclose the identity of a source who preferred to remain anonymous because journalists get to protect their sources. I also imagine that the judge found from the facts presented (or lack thereof) that the standard practices which allow for that kind of protection were not generally followed on TS. For example, to shield sources in this way, a journalist usually has to show both that he corroborated this particular piece of info in some way and that it was the regular practice of his outlet so to do. TS clearly doesn't operate that way...which isn't bad or wrong in my opinion, but it would be an abuse of these laws to let them apply in the TS scenario.
Let's not make this about some kind of slam on the blog community. Judges exist to know the rules and to apply them fairly. TS took a shot at interpreting the rules one way, and the judge said no. Don't get distracted by the rhetoric.
adam b.
(I shouldn't, but this is half of the fun!)
Who is to decide whether someone did their research or not? Well, I don't know, any sane, rational person who asks the journalist "Hey journalist, where the hell did you get all that information for that story you wrote? Who did you talk to, that I can go and confirm what they said? What books did you read that I can go read them myself?" This isn't one of those cases where we can bull-shit with "it's all relative". It seems to me that 99% of the blogs out there are whinny, opinionated, stupid crap, perhaps on the same level as some of the sensationalist crap you get on Fox News.
But more seriously, there are many, many real journalists out there who do actually take pride in their craft, who do make an effort to report the facts as objectively as possible. Blogs aren't treated like news outlets because there are professional and societal controls on news outlets that try to ensure what goes into a paper is more like objective news and not opinionated crap. It wouldn't make sense to try to apply such standards to a blog exactly because most bloggers are publishing their own opinions (and want to keep it that way). Without those standards, treating anything that comes out of a blog as news is a bad idea.
Blogging is far too broad a term to use with precision. It simply means the act of publishing something -- anything -- on a blog.
Likewise, writing is far too broad a term to use with precision. Most of what is written and published is not journalism, regardless of where it is published.
Then there's this: all reporters are journalists, but not all journalists are reporters.
Here's the point: journalism and reporting are types of behavior, rather well-defined, that merit protection. It is irrelevant where the product of that behavior -- the writing -- is published. If it happens to be published in a blog, then it merits protection.
But, simply writing for a blog doesn't, by itself, merit protection, anymore than writing for a newspaper, by itself, merits protection.
That means that if the ThinkSecret guy engaged in something we'd recognize as reporting to get that sotry, then the court's decision should apply to any and all journalists, whether they publish in a blog or not.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Like the recent Vioxx scandal. That was all protected under NDA. There were concerns that Vioxx might increase heart attacks but the initial research was statistically inconclusive and so the results were buried. For several years.
In this case, the object of the contract is still lawful (there wasn't CONCLUSIVE evidence) but a corporate leak at this point might've saved hundreds of lives.
Or how about Windows virus announcements? You could have a security issue that Microsoft wants to keep buried. But it's only a theoretical issue not seen in the wild and Microsoft's going to patch it in the next service pack release... Is it a violation of NDA to leak that info?
Like someone else on here posted. How do you know you have a protected violation of the NDA until after you've violated the NDA and other people have decided that for you? (and maybe not in your favor)
And I'm sure there are quite a few cases in which the "mainstream media" had it wrong. One need not look any further than CBSNews and the Bush files to see that.
I'd say that in some cases bloggers might conduct enough investigation to be considered journalism and in some cases the mainstream media disregards the truth or does not conduct adequate research to warrant their elevation above a common blogger.
In either case, we should be suspicious of and look for biases in everything we read--be it from a blog or from the "mainstream media." Both have provided ample reason to not put our full trust in what they report.