Senate Bill Says Bloggers Are Journalists

Mr. Gebhart points to good news for bloggers: in a reversal of an earlier amendment, Senators Schumer and Specter have announced that new federal shield legislation for journalists will include a broad definition of journalism. Short form: if you are engaged in the following activity, the feds have to make a pretty strong case to force you to reveal confidential sources.

(5) JOURNALISM- The term ‘journalism’ means the regular gathering, preparing, collecting, photographing, recording, writing, editing, reporting, or publishing of news or information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public [S. 448, Free Flow of Information Act, Section 8, Clause 5, as published on OpenCongress.org, 2009.11.01].

Gathering, preparing, collecting, photographing, recording, writing, editing, reporting, publishing... yeah, we bloggers do all that.

Over four years of blogging, my own understanding of what blogging is and isn't has changed significantly. I once thought, as Mr. Epp did, that we needed to keep some daylight between blogger and journalist. But interacting with other citizen journalists, thinking about Paul Harvey, and banging out articles at a rate of over a thousand a year (this is #2982 on the Madville Times) has made me comfortable with accepting the label journalist. The United States Senate appears to be moving in that same direction.

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p.s.: Mr. Gebhart does the best epigraphs. Here's the quote with which he punctuates his post on S.448:

And it occurred to me that there is no such thing as blogging. There is no such thing as a blogger. Blogging is just writing — writing using a particularly efficient type of publishing technology.

—Simon Dumenco, “A Blogger is Just a Writer with
a Cooler Name” [discussed at WordMunger]

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Update 2009.11.03 09:21 CST: Mr. Gebhart forwards to me an article from the Citizens Media Law Project, which gets the new language defining who's covered under the amended Senate bill. They "applaud this renewed focus on the function carried out by the individual in question, rather than occupational status." CMLP links to Zachary M. Seward at the Nieman Journalism Lab, who points out that the House version still shields only reporters who produce journalism "for a substantial portion of the person’s livelihood or for substantial financial gain."

TransCanada Settlements -- Why More Secrets?

Update on the TransCanada settlements: AP's Chet Brokaw reports that the settlements reached Friday cover just the first batch of landowners who were scheduled to go to court yesterday, not the whole South Dakota group. Keystone pipeline project rep Jeff Rauh says talks are still ongoing with some landowners.

Alas, those other landowners and the rest of us interested in learning whether TransCanada is finally playing fair with everyone won't get to find out what the settlements reached so far consist of: "Rauh said both sides in the trials agreed that the terms of the agreement would be confidential" [Chet Brokaw, "Settlement Reached in Pipeline's First Eminent Domain Trials," AP via Aberdeen American News, 2008.06.09].

Whether it's settlements like this or contracts or what have you, the moneyed interests in our state impose far too many restrictions on information in our society. The landowners have already been pushed into sacrificing their property rights; why take a bite out of their free-speech rights as well? Other folks along the Keystone route and in the way of future pipelines and other industrial projects (like Doug and his West River neighbors) deserve to know what TransCanada's final offer is.

There are plenty of matters that are none of our business. But the terms under which a foreign corporation lays claim in practical perpetuity to South Dakota land and puts our land and water at permanent risk should be a matter of public record.