Media Privileges for Bloggers
Eugene Volokh has an excellent summary of the extent to which bloggers enjoy the same protections as other journalists under the law. The premise:
The question now isn’t whether bloggers are entitled to First Amendment protections; they are. Rather, it’s whether bloggers are entitled to additional protections, beyond what the First Amendment requires. The First Amendment either secures no journalist’s privilege, or a relatively limited one. (The matter isn’t squarely settled in the courts.) But many states do provide a journalist’s privilege, often a broad one.
Unfortunately, because the protections are statutory and state-to-state, there is incredible, essentially random, variance.
It seems to me axiomatic, and not just as a matter of self interest, that a journalist is a journalist regardless of the medium. That’s not necessarily what the law says, though.
