Is Eugene Volokh a blogger? Is Howie Kurtz a journalist?

Jailed Man Is A Videographer And a Blogger but Is He a Journalist?

kurtz, along with the government, obviously has some difficulty grasping the idea of citizen-centered journalism...

[Josh Wolf, a 24-year-old blogger,] was a student at San Francisco State who worked part time as an outreach staffer at a community college television station. He started a blog and occasionally sold videotape to news organizations.

"I would define a journalist as someone who brings news to the public," says Garbus, a noted First Amendment lawyer handling the case on a pro bono basis. "It's a definition that might cause journalists some discomfort because it opens up the gates."

But U.S. Attorney Kevin Ryan says in a court filing that Wolf's resistance "is apparently fueled by his anointment as a journalistic martyr" and that he needs "to come to grips with the fact that he was simply a person with a video camera who happened to record some public events."

perhaps their difficulty stems from this...

Wolf's case has attracted far less attention because he is not affiliated with any news outlet.

it's also very interesting that one of the sources kurtz contacted is himself a blogger with a fairly far-right reputation [see The Volokh Conspiracy and PajamasMedia], a fact which kurtz conveniently fails to mention...

"It's one thing to say journalists must respect promises of confidentiality they made to their sources," says Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. "It would be quite another to say journalists have a right to refuse to testify even about non-confidential sources. When something is videotaped in a public place, it's hard to see even an implied agreement of confidentiality."

but, after all, volokh IS on the faculty of UCLA while wolf was only a staffer at a community college...

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