Media Shield Laws Certainly SHOULD Apply to Bloggers who gather news, research, take interviews and report just Like those Coveted "REAL Journalists.

"The debate over whether bloggers are journalists has been going on for years, but the consensus has been largely settled — on the opposite side of what Judge Hernandez has ruled. Attorney Bruce E. H. Johnson, who wrote the media shield laws in next-door Washington State, told Seattle Weekly that those laws would have protected Cox had her case been tried in Washington.

In a more high-profile case, an editor from Gizmodo escaped criminal charges after revealing to the world an iPhone prototype lost in a bar. Although police raided the California home of editor Jason Chen in 2010, the case was cited as a test for that state’s media shield law, and the district attorney said publicly this year that no charges would be filed to anyone from the site.

When discussing the case, Steve Jobs told The Wall Street Journal‘s Walt Mossberg that he believed Chen was “a guy,” not a journalist. Mossberg countered that he himself was a blogger, and that he thought bloggers were journalists. (You can see the exchange in this video, at about the 17:00 mark.)

Are bloggers the same as journalists? And if not, what is the dividing line? Share your thoughts in the comments."

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