Because I work in publishing (albeit at the magazine end), and I'm tired of having my and my colleagues' work at best disregarded as trivial, irrelevant, non-existant or at worst portrayed as the actions of parasites routinely on/. This is usually as part of a justification process for disregarding copyrights that people would prefer didn't exist (much as I'm sure some software companies wish they could ignore the copyright on F/OSS), or the basis of some superficial vision of an Internet-driven info-utopia were there are no middle men or woman (i.e. editors or librarians). Most publishers add considerable value, both in improving authors' work and in selecting that work in first place.
I'm sorry for going off on you, but I'd just seen the trope of "publishers do nothing but inflate the cost of others' work" once too often.
Book publishers, however, have no such excuse. The only costs they incur is the printing/distribution/advertising.
For a vanity publisher this is usually the case. However, for any publisher who is competing for, e.g., space on retail shelves this is not true because their reputation with retailers is vital to getting those retailers to gamble on ordering their next book. Non-vanity publishing is typically a year-long process: manuscripts are selected by editors from a large pile of submissions. Then manuscripts are edited (and re-edited and...), copy edited, and laid out. Many non-fiction books are peer-reviewed, and controversial books often involve legal advice -- even something like a cook book typically requires that the publisher hires someone to make and test all the recipies. Cover art must be commissioned. And so on. To say that the average book publisher's only costs are "printing/distribution/advertising" are the words of someone who simply does not know what they're talking about.
Isn't this kind of the same argument for the RIAA and the MPAA?
No, it's the argument for Dreamworks, or Paramount Pictures, or even Project Greenlight, i.e. people who look at an avalanche of scripts and pick which ones get made. And if you think a lot of lousy movies get made, or a lot of sucky books get published, you should look at the slush pile of a movie production office, or book publisher sometime: 90% of what's there would make, well, Mission to Mars look like 2001: A Space Odyssey.
To put in another way: modern video technology can theoretically allow almost anyone to put together a TV show that would have required the resources of a major network in years past, and we've all seen examples online of some amazing stuff. Still, assuming you have cable, how many hours a week do you spend watching a network, major or minor, versus the local public access channel?
How is it we are able to fish out the good FOSS projects from the crap?
Whether or not something compiles is a pretty good first order filter. In publishing though, if you can put words on a piece of paper -- however poorly spelled, grammatically incorrect, or non-sensical -- you look just like James Joyce until a human being sits down and reads it. Software and literature are not equivalent, and so the analogy fails.
Those who know a lot about technology build their own machines and, nowadays, are putting GNU/Linux and other free software OSes on them.
I'm an experienced tech journalist too, and before OS X, yeah, I was all about building my own white boxes, and sticking Linux on them. But then along came OS X, and I mostly stopped doing that because, after all, I'm getting paid to be a writer, not be a sys-admin, and OS X Just Works in a way that Linux doesn't. Plus it'll run a native version of Microsoft Word alongside, say, Konqueror.
Apple computers have never been geared toward the tech savvy; they have always been marketed to the artistic technophobe.
OS X unix roots make it a great machine for the tech savvy, and its increasingly being adopted as such -- if you don't believe me, visit, say, JPL and look at what its space/engineering geeks are using: lots and lots of powerbooks.
But unless they write for an Apple-centric pub, tech journalists do not usually use Macs, especially the most tech-savvy of the lot.
Maybe we live in different parts of the country, because most of the science/tech journalists I know in NYC use Macs.
And I wonder how many professional journalists have Macs at home as well?
Unless they're specialists working the software beat or geeks in general, I'd say few journalists have another computer of any stripe at home, simply because a good laptop is all the computer most people need.
Surely a large proportion of them must have Windows-based systems at home, if only because they're cheaper to buy than Macs.
Between the Mac Mini, the eMac, and the iBook, I don't think that has been true for some time, but YMMV.
Indeed at my magazine, over the last few years rather than have the staff use Desktops in the office, with a few floater laptops for going on the road, when their desktop came to the end of its lease it was replaced with a laptop. There are huge advantages in having your stuff all in one place, and being able to take that place with you.
But how much of the writing is actually done on a Mac? Now, it may be that conventional journalists may use Macs more often than not, but I suspect most freelancers are using Windows systems. Or even Linux. And producing Microsoft Word documents more than likely. Almost everyone I've written for accepts Word documents, for many it's the preferred (often the only) format.
a) You can get Word (and nearly the entire Office suite) as an OS X application. Microsoft has, after all, been writing software for Apple longer than its been writing software for MS Windows.
b) As a journalist, I can tell you anecdotely that the proportion of reporters I see at conferences, etc., who use Macs versus those on PCs is much higher than in the general population.
c) In a lot of places the layout/design production end is at least partially integrated with the editorial end, so that articles can go into a system as manuscripts (i.e. Word documents), have a few rounds of edits and get laid out all in one tracking system. This also allows editors to do screen edits: i.e. we can't change any of the graphical elements, but we can still edit text ourselves even after its been laid out in something like Quark. This is great when you have to do someting like shorten an article by 5 lines to make it fit the available space: it's something only an editor can do, and it saves having to have us stand over the shoulder of a layour person.
for example some of the street scenes are clearly recognizable as Cardiff to someone familiar with the area
Sure, but that's like complaining that a lot of TV shows that are notionally set, say, in New York City are recognizable as being filmed in Toronto to a local, or that X-Files and Stargate settings look very familiar to someone who grew up around Vancouver. Or that Star Wars would remind someone from Tunisia of home. In any case, anyone familiar with Cardiff is going to be familiar enough with London geographic references, visual, aural, and verbal, so as not be confused:)
Dr. Who was created as something more than just for kids, and appealed to adult and child audiences for many years. Its later decline can be traced back to when the BBC started thinking of it a just a children's program, not a show for the entire family, which the 2005 series restored it to being.
If Rose was able to destroy the Daleks by simply having a long look at the TARDIS core, then why did the entire Gallifreyian species die out in the Dalek conflict? Were none of them able to do the same? Why was the Doctor able to survive the exposure?
It's clearly established that the results of unlimited time activity, let alone interacting directly with the vortex, can led to results that are dangerous, and at best, unpredictable. Rose gambled that she could look into the vortex because she believed she had left herself clues, which indicated at least temporary lucid survival. Absent such clues, the Gallifreyians wouldn't access the vortex in a premeditated fashion, because the results could be disasterous.
why did the God Dalek consent to use humans as raw material?
The Dalek Emperor gave a lengthy rant about how only one cell in a zillion was deemed fit to be used, unlike the captured Dalek, who had no choice but to mainline Rose, but even then it's not for nothing that the Dalek Emperor was n-u-t-s -- casting himself as a God was the only to resolve the cognitive dissonance of using non-Dalek material.
Why would the Autons, the Rift, the Slovenes, the gas creatures, and Rose's home all be in Cardiff?
Because they aren't? Most of the present-day terrestrial action -- apart from the Rift follow-up with the last Slovene -- takes place in London, not Cardiff. Rose's home, and the store she worked in, were in London. (Hints: establishing shots of famous London landmarks, the Millenium Eye used a plot device, alien saucer crashing into Big Ben, accents, etc)
More attention seems to have been paid to continuity in the old series.
Actually, apart from inside multi-episode arcs, the old show was famous for making continuity bobbles and tripping itself up, hence the huge problems that arose when fans tried to write a history of the Daleks, for example.
Actually, it's already been done. At a show called INSTALL.EXE a few years back at the Eyebeam Gallery in NYC, they had a number of abstract interactive installations (to call them 'games' might be stretching the term a bit) based on the source for Wolfenstein-3D and Quake. Here's a review.
300,000 visits is still a tiny number compared to the number of people around the world who could have read Boing Boing, or any other blog that day, but who actually read a newspaper, or went to CNN.com, etc. Again, look at the Forrester numbers: 2% visit blogs regularly, 65% read a local paper.
That aside, some of the people who contribute to Boing Boing are journalists, but I wouldn't make that presumption about someone based on seeing their byline on the Boing Boing front page alone, in the same way that I would make that presumption if I saw someone's byline on the front page of USA Today or The New York Times. Some bloggers probably do deserve shield law protection, but I don't think blogs as a whole currently deserve the presumption of that protection in the same way that established media structures, from the local community newspaper to CNN, whether online or off, do.
I'm thinking that a blog should be assumed to have that shield
My concern with erring on the side of giving the blogger the presumption of journalism, is that shield protection would then get extended to every single American with an Internet connection -- as the Miller case has highlighted, source protection must extend to stories that journalists haven't published yet and even stories that never get published at all. If everyone could presumptively claim the protection of the shield law on the basis that they were going to publish a blog entry based on a conversation, then practically every conversation would be privileged until a judge declared otherwise. This would cause huge problems for the US legal and civic systems.
I think the test for being able to avail of a shield law should be along the lines of "Am I publishing original information that is of public interest?"
I'm a professional journalist too, but I don't expect to be able to avail of any shield law when I post to my personal LiveJournal, as the random trivia of my life is not of general public interest. Now, I could imagine a situation where I did publish actual journalism in my LiveJournal, with the presumption that I could claim protection under a shield law, but the fact that you and I can point to evidence that we are "members of the press," beyond our ability to post some HTML, does makes a difference, just as there are very broad definitions of what constitutes a religion, but you and I might have a hard time convincing the IRS to give us tax-exempt status just because we declared ourselves the Popes of Chillietown.
As I mentioned elsewhere, the statute should be worded broadly enough so that the courts have the latitude to include people who are not part of traditional media structures (online or off) under the shield law protections on a case-by-case basis. However, I don't think that a blogger can avail of a presumption that they are a journalist, given that most blogs either are not intended to be of general public interest, or contain reposts or editorialization of content generated elsewhere (after all, if you're not doing original reporting, you have no sources to protect, and so don't need a shield law) and in any case, presumptively extending the shield law to every American who has Internet access would be problematic (remember, as the Miller case highlighted, journalists must have the ability to protect all their sources, not just those used for stories that are published.)
Finally, as a practical matter, if it is a case where I can get Federal shield protection for articles I write professionally, but not for articles I write independently, I'd be more than happy to get that. It's more important that the work which serves 65% of the population (in the case of local newspapers) across a broad spectrum gets protection than the work that serves 2% of the population, and a 2% that tends to be already pretty privileged at that.
So when FoxNews decides to see what various blogs are saying today, and they put several of these blogs on the big screen behind the desk, does that count as their entire viewership reading the blog?
Nope, just as when, say Readers Digest or Utne Reader, reprint something, it doesn't count toward the circulation of the original publication.
There are quite a few online "news sites" that could end up in uncertain waters under this situation.
Sure, which is why I agree with the suggestion that the law be worded broadly enough so that the courts can decide on the journalistic credentials of someone outside traditional media structures on a case-by-case basis. My point is that traditional journalists (online and off) deserve higher priority for shield law consideration than bloggers, and that blogs as a general class, have not yet met (the admitedly ill-defined point) where they can be presumptively considered to be the products of journalists, or deserving of the special privileges that the US constitution extends to the press in exchange for its contribution to a free society.
But if all you're doing is intepreting news then you don't have any sources to protect! If you don't have any private sources, you don't need shield law privileges. Barring established limitations on free speech (libel, inciting violence, etc) you're already covered under the free speech provision of the constitution.
There should be no special protections for someone doing something professionally in the private sector
As I noted elsewhere, members of the press have had legal privileges since the first amendment (with its specific inclusion of the press) was adopted, because of the press's believed unique contribution to maintaining a free society. If you don't like the idea of journalists getting special treatment, I suggest you start gathering those petition signatures to repeal the 1st amendment:)
This is an interesting approach, and could be a much more useful line of thought than trying to define journalist. My biggest problem with automatically recognizing a blogger as a member of the fourth estate is that in many cases they're either simply reposting or editorializing on content originated by others, or generating content that has no reasonable public interest, i.e. your friends may care about what Mitsy the Kitten did yesterday, or your bizzare theory involving tinfoil and the Ford Company, but no-one else will.
It seems to me that original (but not neccesarily unique) research and reporting is one of the hallmarks of a journalist, and so maybe reflecting this in a definition of news, say "Original information of public interest" may help us get closer to the mark of seperating those who need (and deserve) shield law privileges from those who don't.
I agree there's a lot of bad journalism out there, and, fundamentally I think you have a point with your distinction between editorializing and reporting. However, even in your example, apart from the last sentence, things are rarely black and white. What if, for example, in your reporting you discovered that the leadership of local NRA chapter were led by ex-members of the KKK who'd been inciting violence against minorities for years, and the poor hyphenated Americans were starving migrant workers whose boss just refused to pay them for a season's work? Then it would be perfectly appropriate for a bona-fide journalist to write the second version as part of a larger piece (again, sans the final sentence). All journalism has a viewpoint, even if its just deciding what's newsworthy (shooting at store) versus what isn't (area homless population remains at 500).
But I don't think bloggers make a strong case for themselves when they point out that the best blogs are better than the worst traditional media (online or off), because that's not exactly a high threshold.
So, what happens when the readership of blogs is 1/3 of newspapers?
Then we'll talk.:) I don't think this'll happen for some time, if ever, so I may never have to answer the question! But I do think a truly broad readership would help legitimize blogs, given that the reason why the press has special protections in the first place is because of its unique role in a free society.
But even then there's the issue of originality: if a blog is just editorializing about content generated elsewhere or generating content which could not be considered to have any public interest (i.e. the trivia of your dog's toilet training doesn't cut it), I don't think the blogger deserves the same protections as a reporting journalist, since, after all, the blogger doesn't have any sources to protect in the first place!
All that said, I agree with an earlier poster who suggested the statute be worded broadly and it be left up to the courts to decide on a case-by-case basis if someone outside the traditional media structures qualifies as a journalist.
Granting privileges to members of the press is nothing new. The press has had special privileges since practically day one in the US, and these privileges were established in the constitution. The 1st amendement reads (emphasis added):
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Why does the press get special privileges? Because it was considered that a free press is a vital element of a democracy, unlike any other industry.
As a current working journalist, I agree. What blog boosters tend to forget, in all the clamour about "grassroots journalism" vs. charges of professional or corporate elitism, is that the audience of blogs is very, very small. According to a recent Forrester survey, less than 2% of Americans who go online read blogs once a week or more, compared to the 65% who read their local paper. Most people -- especially those who don't have the money to pay the Internet toll, or the time to surf the blogosphere -- get their news from television, magazine and newspapers, and to a lesser extent, their online equivalents. Therefore, if you really believe in the press as a vital player for justice and democracy, securing shield law protection for journalists who work for these outlets -- which serve the majority of Americans, including those left out in the cold by the blogosphere -- is a higher priority than securing those protections for bloggers.
The Earth's deviation from a sphere is enough to make a noticeable difference in the ground track of a satellite or spacecraft in all but the very briefest of missions, see here.
While the growth of wifi is an important factor, I think the original article missed another contributing factor: changes in peripherals. Once upon a time, apart from printers, most peripherals -- scanners, modems, etc -- required an expansion card of some sort, and the classic, bus mounted, cards for desktops were cheap and universal. Peripherals for laptops often had premium pricing, and in any case, laptops only offered a few card slots or serial/parallel ports. If you cared about expandability, or upgradability, desktops were the way to go.
Nowadays, between USB and Firewire, a laptop is on a level playing field as far as peripherals are concerned, especially because many devices double as hubs, reliving pressure on laptop real estate. Plus, expensive docking stations are less of an issue -- for example, I use a laptop as my primary machine, but that would a pain for writing things of any length on a routine basis, so at work I just plug a regular flatscreen and a USB keyboard and mouse (the mouse actually plugs into the keyboard) and go.
In any case the peripherals most people use most often -- wireless and wired network interfaces -- tend to be built right in these days. And as for upgradability: as the article points out most people have more than enough juice in their laptops to do what they need to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Because I work in publishing (albeit at the magazine end), and I'm tired of having my and my colleagues' work at best disregarded as trivial, irrelevant, non-existant or at worst portrayed as the actions of parasites routinely on /. This is usually as part of a justification process for disregarding copyrights that people would prefer didn't exist (much as I'm sure some software companies wish they could ignore the copyright on F/OSS), or the basis of some superficial vision of an Internet-driven info-utopia were there are no middle men or woman (i.e. editors or librarians). Most publishers add considerable value, both in improving authors' work and in selecting that work in first place.
I'm sorry for going off on you, but I'd just seen the trope of "publishers do nothing but inflate the cost of others' work" once too often.
Book publishers, however, have no such excuse. The only costs they incur is the printing/distribution/advertising.
For a vanity publisher this is usually the case. However, for any publisher who is competing for, e.g., space on retail shelves this is not true because their reputation with retailers is vital to getting those retailers to gamble on ordering their next book. Non-vanity publishing is typically a year-long process: manuscripts are selected by editors from a large pile of submissions. Then manuscripts are edited (and re-edited and...), copy edited, and laid out. Many non-fiction books are peer-reviewed, and controversial books often involve legal advice -- even something like a cook book typically requires that the publisher hires someone to make and test all the recipies. Cover art must be commissioned. And so on. To say that the average book publisher's only costs are "printing/distribution/advertising" are the words of someone who simply does not know what they're talking about.
Isn't this kind of the same argument for the RIAA and the MPAA?
No, it's the argument for Dreamworks, or Paramount Pictures, or even Project Greenlight, i.e. people who look at an avalanche of scripts and pick which ones get made. And if you think a lot of lousy movies get made, or a lot of sucky books get published, you should look at the slush pile of a movie production office, or book publisher sometime: 90% of what's there would make, well, Mission to Mars look like 2001: A Space Odyssey.
To put in another way: modern video technology can theoretically allow almost anyone to put together a TV show that would have required the resources of a major network in years past, and we've all seen examples online of some amazing stuff. Still, assuming you have cable, how many hours a week do you spend watching a network, major or minor, versus the local public access channel?
How is it we are able to fish out the good FOSS projects from the crap?
Whether or not something compiles is a pretty good first order filter. In publishing though, if you can put words on a piece of paper -- however poorly spelled, grammatically incorrect, or non-sensical -- you look just like James Joyce until a human being sits down and reads it. Software and literature are not equivalent, and so the analogy fails.
Those who know a lot about technology build their own machines and, nowadays, are putting GNU/Linux and other free software OSes on them.
I'm an experienced tech journalist too, and before OS X, yeah, I was all about building my own white boxes, and sticking Linux on them. But then along came OS X, and I mostly stopped doing that because, after all, I'm getting paid to be a writer, not be a sys-admin, and OS X Just Works in a way that Linux doesn't. Plus it'll run a native version of Microsoft Word alongside, say, Konqueror.
Apple computers have never been geared toward the tech savvy; they have always been marketed to the artistic technophobe.
OS X unix roots make it a great machine for the tech savvy, and its increasingly being adopted as such -- if you don't believe me, visit, say, JPL and look at what its space/engineering geeks are using: lots and lots of powerbooks.
But unless they write for an Apple-centric pub, tech journalists do not usually use Macs, especially the most tech-savvy of the lot.
Maybe we live in different parts of the country, because most of the science/tech journalists I know in NYC use Macs.
And I wonder how many professional journalists have Macs at home as well?
Unless they're specialists working the software beat or geeks in general, I'd say few journalists have another computer of any stripe at home, simply because a good laptop is all the computer most people need.
Surely a large proportion of them must have Windows-based systems at home, if only because they're cheaper to buy than Macs.
Between the Mac Mini, the eMac, and the iBook, I don't think that has been true for some time, but YMMV.
Indeed at my magazine, over the last few years rather than have the staff use Desktops in the office, with a few floater laptops for going on the road, when their desktop came to the end of its lease it was replaced with a laptop. There are huge advantages in having your stuff all in one place, and being able to take that place with you.
But how much of the writing is actually done on a Mac? Now, it may be that conventional journalists may use Macs more often than not, but I suspect most freelancers are using Windows systems. Or even Linux. And producing Microsoft Word documents more than likely. Almost everyone I've written for accepts Word documents, for many it's the preferred (often the only) format.
a) You can get Word (and nearly the entire Office suite) as an OS X application. Microsoft has, after all, been writing software for Apple longer than its been writing software for MS Windows.
b) As a journalist, I can tell you anecdotely that the proportion of reporters I see at conferences, etc., who use Macs versus those on PCs is much higher than in the general population.
c) In a lot of places the layout/design production end is at least partially integrated with the editorial end, so that articles can go into a system as manuscripts (i.e. Word documents), have a few rounds of edits and get laid out all in one tracking system. This also allows editors to do screen edits: i.e. we can't change any of the graphical elements, but we can still edit text ourselves even after its been laid out in something like Quark. This is great when you have to do someting like shorten an article by 5 lines to make it fit the available space: it's something only an editor can do, and it saves having to have us stand over the shoulder of a layour person.
for example some of the street scenes are clearly recognizable as Cardiff to someone familiar with the area
:)
Sure, but that's like complaining that a lot of TV shows that are notionally set, say, in New York City are recognizable as being filmed in Toronto to a local, or that X-Files and Stargate settings look very familiar to someone who grew up around Vancouver. Or that Star Wars would remind someone from Tunisia of home. In any case, anyone familiar with Cardiff is going to be familiar enough with London geographic references, visual, aural, and verbal, so as not be confused
Dr. Who was created as something more than just for kids, and appealed to adult and child audiences for many years. Its later decline can be traced back to when the BBC started thinking of it a just a children's program, not a show for the entire family, which the 2005 series restored it to being.
If Rose was able to destroy the Daleks by simply having a long look at the TARDIS core, then why did the entire Gallifreyian species die out in the Dalek conflict? Were none of them able to do the same? Why was the Doctor able to survive the exposure?
It's clearly established that the results of unlimited time activity, let alone interacting directly with the vortex, can led to results that are dangerous, and at best, unpredictable. Rose gambled that she could look into the vortex because she believed she had left herself clues, which indicated at least temporary lucid survival. Absent such clues, the Gallifreyians wouldn't access the vortex in a premeditated fashion, because the results could be disasterous.
why did the God Dalek consent to use humans as raw material?
The Dalek Emperor gave a lengthy rant about how only one cell in a zillion was deemed fit to be used, unlike the captured Dalek, who had no choice but to mainline Rose, but even then it's not for nothing that the Dalek Emperor was n-u-t-s -- casting himself as a God was the only to resolve the cognitive dissonance of using non-Dalek material.
Why would the Autons, the Rift, the Slovenes, the gas creatures, and Rose's home all be in Cardiff?
Because they aren't? Most of the present-day terrestrial action -- apart from the Rift follow-up with the last Slovene -- takes place in London, not Cardiff. Rose's home, and the store she worked in, were in London. (Hints: establishing shots of famous London landmarks, the Millenium Eye used a plot device, alien saucer crashing into Big Ben, accents, etc)
More attention seems to have been paid to continuity in the old series.
Actually, apart from inside multi-episode arcs, the old show was famous for making continuity bobbles and tripping itself up, hence the huge problems that arose when fans tried to write a history of the Daleks, for example.
a post-modern abstractist style FPS
Actually, it's already been done. At a show called INSTALL.EXE a few years back at the Eyebeam Gallery in NYC, they had a number of abstract interactive installations (to call them 'games' might be stretching the term a bit) based on the source for Wolfenstein-3D and Quake. Here's a review.
300,000 visits is still a tiny number compared to the number of people around the world who could have read Boing Boing, or any other blog that day, but who actually read a newspaper, or went to CNN.com, etc. Again, look at the Forrester numbers: 2% visit blogs regularly, 65% read a local paper.
That aside, some of the people who contribute to Boing Boing are journalists, but I wouldn't make that presumption about someone based on seeing their byline on the Boing Boing front page alone, in the same way that I would make that presumption if I saw someone's byline on the front page of USA Today or The New York Times. Some bloggers probably do deserve shield law protection, but I don't think blogs as a whole currently deserve the presumption of that protection in the same way that established media structures, from the local community newspaper to CNN, whether online or off, do.
I'm thinking that a blog should be assumed to have that shield
My concern with erring on the side of giving the blogger the presumption of journalism, is that shield protection would then get extended to every single American with an Internet connection -- as the Miller case has highlighted, source protection must extend to stories that journalists haven't published yet and even stories that never get published at all. If everyone could presumptively claim the protection of the shield law on the basis that they were going to publish a blog entry based on a conversation, then practically every conversation would be privileged until a judge declared otherwise. This would cause huge problems for the US legal and civic systems.
I think the test for being able to avail of a shield law should be along the lines of "Am I publishing original information that is of public interest?"
I'm a professional journalist too, but I don't expect to be able to avail of any shield law when I post to my personal LiveJournal, as the random trivia of my life is not of general public interest. Now, I could imagine a situation where I did publish actual journalism in my LiveJournal, with the presumption that I could claim protection under a shield law, but the fact that you and I can point to evidence that we are "members of the press," beyond our ability to post some HTML, does makes a difference, just as there are very broad definitions of what constitutes a religion, but you and I might have a hard time convincing the IRS to give us tax-exempt status just because we declared ourselves the Popes of Chillietown.
As I mentioned elsewhere, the statute should be worded broadly enough so that the courts have the latitude to include people who are not part of traditional media structures (online or off) under the shield law protections on a case-by-case basis. However, I don't think that a blogger can avail of a presumption that they are a journalist, given that most blogs either are not intended to be of general public interest, or contain reposts or editorialization of content generated elsewhere (after all, if you're not doing original reporting, you have no sources to protect, and so don't need a shield law) and in any case, presumptively extending the shield law to every American who has Internet access would be problematic (remember, as the Miller case highlighted, journalists must have the ability to protect all their sources, not just those used for stories that are published.)
Finally, as a practical matter, if it is a case where I can get Federal shield protection for articles I write professionally, but not for articles I write independently, I'd be more than happy to get that. It's more important that the work which serves 65% of the population (in the case of local newspapers) across a broad spectrum gets protection than the work that serves 2% of the population, and a 2% that tends to be already pretty privileged at that.
So when FoxNews decides to see what various blogs are saying today, and they put several of these blogs on the big screen behind the desk, does that count as their entire viewership reading the blog?
Nope, just as when, say Readers Digest or Utne Reader, reprint something, it doesn't count toward the circulation of the original publication.
There are quite a few online "news sites" that could end up in uncertain waters under this situation.
Sure, which is why I agree with the suggestion that the law be worded broadly enough so that the courts can decide on the journalistic credentials of someone outside traditional media structures on a case-by-case basis. My point is that traditional journalists (online and off) deserve higher priority for shield law consideration than bloggers, and that blogs as a general class, have not yet met (the admitedly ill-defined point) where they can be presumptively considered to be the products of journalists, or deserving of the special privileges that the US constitution extends to the press in exchange for its contribution to a free society.
But if all you're doing is intepreting news then you don't have any sources to protect! If you don't have any private sources, you don't need shield law privileges. Barring established limitations on free speech (libel, inciting violence, etc) you're already covered under the free speech provision of the constitution.
:)
There should be no special protections for someone doing something professionally in the private sector
As I noted elsewhere, members of the press have had legal privileges since the first amendment (with its specific inclusion of the press) was adopted, because of the press's believed unique contribution to maintaining a free society. If you don't like the idea of journalists getting special treatment, I suggest you start gathering those petition signatures to repeal the 1st amendment
Instead, let's define news.
This is an interesting approach, and could be a much more useful line of thought than trying to define journalist. My biggest problem with automatically recognizing a blogger as a member of the fourth estate is that in many cases they're either simply reposting or editorializing on content originated by others, or generating content that has no reasonable public interest, i.e. your friends may care about what Mitsy the Kitten did yesterday, or your bizzare theory involving tinfoil and the Ford Company, but no-one else will.
It seems to me that original (but not neccesarily unique) research and reporting is one of the hallmarks of a journalist, and so maybe reflecting this in a definition of news, say "Original information of public interest" may help us get closer to the mark of seperating those who need (and deserve) shield law privileges from those who don't.
I agree there's a lot of bad journalism out there, and, fundamentally I think you have a point with your distinction between editorializing and reporting. However, even in your example, apart from the last sentence, things are rarely black and white. What if, for example, in your reporting you discovered that the leadership of local NRA chapter were led by ex-members of the KKK who'd been inciting violence against minorities for years, and the poor hyphenated Americans were starving migrant workers whose boss just refused to pay them for a season's work? Then it would be perfectly appropriate for a bona-fide journalist to write the second version as part of a larger piece (again, sans the final sentence). All journalism has a viewpoint, even if its just deciding what's newsworthy (shooting at store) versus what isn't (area homless population remains at 500).
But I don't think bloggers make a strong case for themselves when they point out that the best blogs are better than the worst traditional media (online or off), because that's not exactly a high threshold.
So, what happens when the readership of blogs is 1/3 of newspapers?
:) I don't think this'll happen for some time, if ever, so I may never have to answer the question! But I do think a truly broad readership would help legitimize blogs, given that the reason why the press has special protections in the first place is because of its unique role in a free society.
Then we'll talk.
But even then there's the issue of originality: if a blog is just editorializing about content generated elsewhere or generating content which could not be considered to have any public interest (i.e. the trivia of your dog's toilet training doesn't cut it), I don't think the blogger deserves the same protections as a reporting journalist, since, after all, the blogger doesn't have any sources to protect in the first place!
All that said, I agree with an earlier poster who suggested the statute be worded broadly and it be left up to the courts to decide on a case-by-case basis if someone outside the traditional media structures qualifies as a journalist.
Granting privileges to members of the press is nothing new. The press has had special privileges since practically day one in the US, and these privileges were established in the constitution. The 1st amendement reads (emphasis added):
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Why does the press get special privileges? Because it was considered that a free press is a vital element of a democracy, unlike any other industry.
As a current working journalist, I agree. What blog boosters tend to forget, in all the clamour about "grassroots journalism" vs. charges of professional or corporate elitism, is that the audience of blogs is very, very small. According to a recent Forrester survey, less than 2% of Americans who go online read blogs once a week or more, compared to the 65% who read their local paper. Most people -- especially those who don't have the money to pay the Internet toll, or the time to surf the blogosphere -- get their news from television, magazine and newspapers, and to a lesser extent, their online equivalents. Therefore, if you really believe in the press as a vital player for justice and democracy, securing shield law protection for journalists who work for these outlets -- which serve the majority of Americans, including those left out in the cold by the blogosphere -- is a higher priority than securing those protections for bloggers.
I think the Congress should just word it broadly and let the courts decide on a case-by-case basis
Now that's a reasonable suggestion! Unfortunately, I suspect it'll be lost amongst the Slashnoise...
The Earth's deviation from a sphere is enough to make a noticeable difference in the ground track of a satellite or spacecraft in all but the very briefest of missions, see here.
it takes no more extra time to take a desktop someplace than it does to take a laptop
:)
Clearly, you're flying a different airline than I am!
While the growth of wifi is an important factor, I think the original article missed another contributing factor: changes in peripherals. Once upon a time, apart from printers, most peripherals -- scanners, modems, etc -- required an expansion card of some sort, and the classic, bus mounted, cards for desktops were cheap and universal. Peripherals for laptops often had premium pricing, and in any case, laptops only offered a few card slots or serial/parallel ports. If you cared about expandability, or upgradability, desktops were the way to go.
Nowadays, between USB and Firewire, a laptop is on a level playing field as far as peripherals are concerned, especially because many devices double as hubs, reliving pressure on laptop real estate. Plus, expensive docking stations are less of an issue -- for example, I use a laptop as my primary machine, but that would a pain for writing things of any length on a routine basis, so at work I just plug a regular flatscreen and a USB keyboard and mouse (the mouse actually plugs into the keyboard) and go.
In any case the peripherals most people use most often -- wireless and wired network interfaces -- tend to be built right in these days. And as for upgradability: as the article points out most people have more than enough juice in their laptops to do what they need to do.