Yes Suzie05, Bloggers are Journalists too
By Emilie Branstetter
In a step to help bring freedom of press to the world wide Internet, Sen. Patrick Leahy has co-authored and helped push through the OPEN Government Act. A reform to the Freedom of Information Act that will help online journalists access information easier and for less money.
Freedom of Information Act requests have always been available to everyone, but journalists have been the only group exempted from the search time and file duplication fees. With the mainstreaming of online journalists and bloggers, government agencies have had a hard time separating legitimate journalists from the rest of the crowd.
The reform to the FOIA, The OPEN Government Act, will help with the decision process by including a simple precedent. Previous publishing history, online journalists and bloggers with a history of publication will have the normal FOIA fee waived plus they will be recognized as legitimate journalists therefore requiring the agency to keep to a more concrete deadline.
There is also an exception to the requirement of a publishing history in the new reform, if you can give the agency an explanation of your use of the information for public distribution you will receive the same benefits as a journalist. In addition, this reform will also close a nasty little loophole that some government hired agencies have been using to discourage particular FOIA requests. The previous loophole was a legal technicality where agencies would force the party making the request to sue the agency for the FOIA information. Waiting till days before the court made a final decision, the agency would then give the information to the requestor leaving them with all of the bills of the suit that they would have otherwise got reimbursed on in the winnings of the suit. Now the agency will have to pay the bill as long as the other party had "substantially prevailed" during the law suit even if the agency caves early.
With such a reform only needing President Bush’s signature to go into effect, according to Ars Technica, publication groups such as the Society of Professional Journalists are hailing it for the positive impact it will have upon all journalistic venues.
Related:
Entry was posted
on Saturday, December 22nd, 2007 at 3:30 pm
under
Read more entries by Emilie Branstetter.
Stumble It!
December 23rd, 2007
Are bloggers journalist? Good question and here is my answer. I am one of three bloggers (correspondents, writers, etc.) on the three blogs of the Thomas Jackson Center. If you visit our site, you’ll see that ClustrMaps has tracked visitors from all over the world who read our blogs. The government may not like to call us journalist even though bloggers have broken some of the biggest stories in recent history. But and the Big But is – that blogs often have more readers than small town newspapers.