Who should you call a journalist, nowadays?

Xeni Jardin 3:52 pm Tue Nov 1, 2005

Snip from the latest column by News.com's Declan McCullagh:

A renewed effort in the U.S. Congress to create a federal shield law for news organizations is raising a sticky question: Who is a journalist?

A generation ago, the answer usually was clear. Not anymore. Online scribes and video publishers are experimenting with novel forms of journalism, and even the most stodgy news organizations are embracing blogs.

That leaves politicians–hardly the most clued in about all things tech–in something of a quandary. They're being lobbied by professional news organizations and the American Bar Association to approve some kind of journalist's shield law while being urged by prosecutors to leave out bloggers.

The justification for a shield law is a perfectly reasonable one. After a federal appeals court enforced grand jury subpoenas against The New York Times and Time magazine, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take the case, news organizations decided to fix the law.

The Justice Department took a swipe at the leading shield proposal
(H.R.3323/S.1419) during a Senate hearing last week, arguing that it would let criminals pose as bloggers.

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