Interesting: The Free Flow of Information Act cleared the House Judiciary Committee. The Act shields reporters from disclosing confidential sources and will soon be sent to the full House for a vote. See here and here.
More interesting: there’s also an attempt to define who or what a journalist actually is in order to prevent “casual” bloggers from claiming shield protection. How? By defining a journalist as someone who derives “financial gain or livelihood” from their work.
According to CNET:
The bill defines the practice of journalism as “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.”
“To extend the shield beyond (those who gain financial benefit) would create an avenue for virtually anyone to avoid compelled testimony by simply creating a blog that contains the information in question,” which is not the bill’s intent, [Rick] Boucher [(D-Va.)] said.
Well that opens a few cans of worms, such as why should financial gain be the arbiter of whether something’s journalism or not. And if it is, does that mean that the more financial gain there is, the more legitimate the journalism is?
Some examples:
Where does citizen journalism fit into this. NowPublic and Associated Content both received over $10 million in funding this past week (from Rho Ventures and Canaan Partners respectively). Do those who write for free get protection?
What about a couple people who come together and say let’s start an investigative publication and work for the joy of it with hopes of receiving financial gain or livelihood at a later date?
Or as Josh Wolf (who spent time in jail for protecting sources that appeared on his blog) notes: what about the righteous who don’t want advertising or sponsors or anything else they think will interfere with the purity of their enterprise?
Michael Cervieri is ScribeMedia.Org’s Executive Producer. Now that he’s posted this, he’s heading to the beach.
