A court in the US has handed down an interesting decision that says a blogger is not a journalist. I say interesting because though I haven’t yet seen the Law Commission report into the “taming if the wild west” of blogging, I would suggest that the Law Commission may well be making recommendations exactly the opposite of the US court decision:
A United States federal judge in Oregon has ruled that a Montana woman sued for defamation was not a journalist when she posted online that an Oregon lawyer acted criminally during a bankruptcy case, a decision with implications for bloggers around the country.
Crystal L Cox, a blogger from Eureka, Montana, was sued for defamation by attorney Kevin Padrick when she posted online that he was a thug and a thief during the handling of bankruptcy proceedings by him and Obsidian Finance Group LLC.
US District Judge Marco Hernandez found last week that as a blogger, Cox was not a journalist and cannot claim the protections afforded to mainstream reporters and news outlets.
I will reserve my comments about where I think we are headed until the Law Commission releases their report. Meanwhile it is an interesting discussion to be had about whether bloggers could conceivably be called journalists.
I certainly think it is valid in some but not all instances, and the some who could would be very few in number.
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