Foreign Perspectives

There’s been an ongoing debate for a number of years now as to whether or not bloggers are the same as journalists some of the time, all of the time, or never but thanks to moves from an unexpected quarter that debate is starting to become a moot point.

In fact, myself and particularly Wendy have been legally declared as being the equivalent of journalists by none other than the Old Bailey in London when they issued a missive to us in connection with a contempt of court action regarding a reporting restriction on a current court case. I’m not naming the case in question here because it isn’t relevant to the current discussion and would merely detract from this discussion.

It is interesting though that prior to that particular missive it would not have been possible for us to obtain details of any court reporting restrictions because we did not qualify as journalists and therefore couldn’t obtain these from the courts as our colleagues over at journalism.co.uk discovered when they tried getting similar information themselves last December. Thus there was the ludricuous situation where we could be held in contempt because of a ruling that we were unable to discover (and, no, they aren’t on the court website).

As it’s the weekend, we can’t try out our new categorisation but hope to give it a spin in the coming week.

One consequence of this change in categorisation is that we felt it necessary to begin publishing our blogs in America and thereby gain some protection of our right to free speech. This isn’t because we felt that we should be able to continue “publishing” the information that was felt to be in contempt of court because now that we are aware that there is a “reporting restriction” and that it applies to us, we’re content to leave that information off the blog until it is legally acceptable to publish it. However, we were sadly disappointed in the attitude of our former UK ISP who took down ALL of our sites when only one comment on one post on one blog apparently triggered the contempt action; our American based registrar supported our freedom of speech. So, as we would like to retain the freedom to express our opinions we have moved the blogs outside the jurisdiction of the English authorities.

Incidently, I have delibrately omitted any links from outside articles from this post to avoid legal issues that were raised by a specific case but are really not relevant to the discussion here. Regretably, it would appear that all of the references which I can dig up on this one refer to that particular case.