Are Bloggers Reporters, Too? "Under what circumstances should an online forum be forced to disclose a source behind information that they're posting?" [Susan Crawford, a law professor at Cardozo law school of Yeshiva University (and a blogger herself)] said. "There is no principled distinction between a New York Times reporter and a blogger for these purposes. Both operate as news sources for wide swaths of the general public."
Blogs, she added, are already becoming more and more powerful, and some have readerships that exceed those of small-town newspapers. [...]
"As the mainstream media has become more and more corporate and more and more like the governmental and corporate bodies that mainstream journalists used to report on," [Brad Friedman, who describes himself as an investigative blogger] said, "a lot of this stuff has fallen now to the bloggers - to do what mainstream folks used to do. It's still serving the exact same purpose: keeping the bad guys honest."
