Court rules bloggers aren’t ‘real’ journalists; they just break all mainstream news

Whoa! Watch out, bloggers. The courts might not protect you if you break stories that mainstream media wishes they had.

A New Jersey state appellate court ruled last week that shield laws don’t protect bloggers because they’re not “real” journalists.

The ruling came after a blogger, Shellee Hale, posted a comment on a blog that Garden State-based software company Too Much Media incurred a security breach. She knew this from anonymous sources and refused to reveal them when the company sued (because of defamation), demanding the names.

Please. In the past couple years, blogs have broken more news stories than any other news outlets.

Let’s see: There was Dan Rather’s mishap on the Killian documents that ultimately got his ass canned; then came Van Jones and his 911Truth.org and Republican-hating binge; then Michelle Malkin’s Anita Dunn piece that questioned the war on Fox News, courtesy the White House; New Jersey students pressed on via blogs and social media in outrage of teacher cutbacks; and, hell, news outlets themselves even have their own blogs that they (well, some) rush to when news breaks.

Jim Lakely at Big Journalism is right when he says, “No ‘official’ body issued a license to Breitbart, or Michelle Malkin, or Ed Morrissey, or the folks at Politico … or even Dan Rather to practice journalism.”

There’s no line drawing and there’s no rules in the future of journalism. We must realize that in order to achieve what people want (as that’s the first rule of mass media…), we can’t give the distinction of “journalist” to a particular person.

The Polk Award even honored the anonymous person who shot the video of Neda as she died in Iran.

The days of posh correspondents and press passes are gone. They are now replaced with young people who grasp the knowledge to report faster than any massive media (hence the tanking of CNN—no one cares for pundit bashing).

And, if judges are willing to protect them because they’re institutional journalists, there’s going to be trouble in the future, as more journos go mobile and go online.

The truth of the matter is that every J-School grad (who now makes $20,000 a year) is heading straight to the Internet, blogging and breaking stories with, at times, an audience that topples mainstream.

Maybe it’s just the court’s fault. They probably still read The Grey Lady. Twitter? What’s that?