By now, most people who read the papers and watch broadcast news probably have heard about all they can bear about the exponential growth of new media and its widening acceptance, particularly among young people.
At some point, the average reader probably is entitled to take a long pull of coffee and say, "OK, we all know about your wrenching challenge, so change, innovate, whatever. Cope already, for God's sake, and get on with it."
Still, as two bills making their way through Congress and the California Legislature demonstrate, news organizations aren't the only institutions struggling to come to terms with the digital future. Lawmakers -- and lobbyists -- in both Washington and Sacramento, like editors and news executives around the world, suddenly are finding that traditional categories and old reflexes don't really speak to some of the most urgent questions associated with the growth of online journalism.
Take, for example, the proposed federal shield law that was voted out of the House Judiciary Committee shortly before the current congressional recess. More than 30 states and the District of Columbia have statutes that protect a reporter from being subpoenaed and forced to reveal confidential sources or to produce notes or unpublished material as evidence. California happens to have the oldest and most comprehensive of these laws, which vary somewhat state to state in the breadth of their shield.
The need for a national statute that would keep reporters and editors from being dragged into court and turned into de facto agents of the state was made abundantly clear during the recent trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. The government essentially built its case against Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff on testimony from reporters coerced into giving evidence by the threat of incarceration.
The bill that passed the House Committee is called the Free Flow of Information Act. It has bipartisan sponsors -- Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) and Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) -- and promises a pretty strong set of protections for journalists, though it exempts information involving national security and trade secrets. The real difficulty with the bill, though, grows out of a problem that has bedeviled every previous and equally well-intentioned attempt to enact a federal shield law. Protecting a journalist inevitably involves defining what one is, and nobody -- not even supporters of such protections -- ever has been particularly comfortable with the notion of having the feds dictate who's a real journalist and who isn't.
