Why should 'journalists' be treated differently from the rest of us?

LLRX Book Review by Heather A. Phillips - We're All Journalists Now: The Transformation of the Press and Reshaping of the Law in the Internet Age | LLRX.com

Gant uses this significant point to support his contention that it is the function of news gathering and the dissemination of ideas that is most important to journalism, and that one's title, income, and employer are at best side issues in determining who is a journalist in the day-to-day realities of issuing press passes as well as in larger policies such as the extension of shield laws.

As frightening as this new world of journalistic (or quasi-journalistic) anarchy is, it is also not without precedent. The author points out that the modern world of blogging and viral videos is in many ways remarkably similar to the world of the broadside and pamphleteers from which our country grew. Gant argues that the democratization of journalism is more like what the Founding Fathers envisioned than the large corporate media outlets that we have come to understand as “the press”. Gant contends that is because of the consolidation of the media that “freedom of the press” seems to many like a special privilege that applies only to powerful, distant and corporations.