Oregon judge rules bloggers aren’t journalists – A U.S. District Court judge in Portland, Ore., ruled that a blogger who wrote about an investment firm that subsequently accused her of defamation must pay the company $2.5 million because she’s a blogger who doesn’t legally qualify as a journalist.[MORE]
Lots of issues with this case, especially with her acting as her own attorney. This is not the first time Blogging has been linked to Journalism. There are some correlations but most serious (i.e. professional) journalists probably don’t blog. Why would they? They get paid to write for a living so why do it for free?
So does getting paid to write make you a journalist and afford you the protections that come with professional journalism? It could but I think it has a lot to do with WHO is paying you. I can put ads on this Blog and technically “get paid” but I’m not specifically being paid to Blog…
I can even make up a fake “Press Pass” online. This does not make me a photo-journalist. Although… It might be useful though to gain (lawful) access to restricted areas and events (kidding)…
I tend to think of “blog” as a term like the word “paper”. Journalists blog all the time. Many technical news sources are collections of blogs now. Dictionary gives a couple of good definitions of the term. The primary meaning is simply someone who is reporting on news. Aha, news. Secondarily but similar it suggests mass audience. So you could reasonably combine those to mean that a journalist is someone who writes about news for a mass audience. Forget about the specific medium. Its really about the content of the article.