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-- When the history of the online media revolution is written, 2006 should merit special mention as a turning point for the blogosphere. This is the year, for better or for worse, when bloggers earned their first official media stripes.
Bloggers have considered themselves media almost since the beginning of their brief existence. They proudly claim the "citizen media" mantle and call their work by names like "grassroots journalism," "participatory journalism" and "public journalism." But self-proclamation doesn't carry the same weight as official recognition -- something bloggers have only just begun to win.
The first significant victory came in March, when the Federal Election Commission largely exempted blogs from campaign finance rules on the grounds that they are media. They applied to blogs the same exemption that governs newspapers, broadcasters and other traditional outlets.
The commission had hinted at such a decision in a November advisory opinion that said the costs incurred by one blog publisher "in covering or carrying news stories, commentary, or editorials on its Web sites are encompassed by the press exception."
The later rules, which the agency approved unanimously, recognized "the Internet as a unique and evolving mode of mass communication and political speech that is distinct from other media in a manner that warrants a restrained regulatory approach."
More recently, bloggers have scored wins in the state judicial and legislative branches, including a ruling for independent journalists who had been sued in California by Apple Computer.
The defendants in that case, Apple Insider and PowerPage, had posted information about a forthcoming product. The information was provided by anonymous company sources, and Apple argued that the publication of the information violated trade secrets. They wanted the blogs to disclose their sources.
The bloggers, defended by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said California's "shield law" for protecting journalistic sources applied to them. The state district court sided with Apple, but the appeals court overturned that ruling.
"We decline the implicit invitation to embroil ourselves in questions of what constitutes 'legitimate journalis[m],'" the court wrote on May 26. "The shield law is intended to protect the gathering and dissemination of news, and that is what petitioners did here." The court added that the Web postings were "conceptually indistinguishable from publishing a newspaper, and we see no theoretical basis for treating it differently."
Earlier that month, an advertising agency dropped a similar lawsuit against a blog named the Maine Web Report after bad publicity in the blogosphere. And in Connecticut, state legislators passed a shield law after rejecting an effort to exclude blog authors and people without journalism degrees.
All of those developments indicate the government's growing acceptance of grassroots publications as valid sources of information. "[A] solid body of law is being developed upholding the principles that citizen media deserves the same First Amendment protections as 'professional' journalists," Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos wrote after the Apple ruling.
There are still obstacles to the official recognition of the convergence between old and new media, however. The debate about shield laws is a case in point. Not all states have them, and while bills before Congress would let journalists protect their anonymous sources, not everyone is keen on the idea of giving such protection to citizens who think of themselves as journalists. --
