Looking at case studies of blogger press freedom conflicts over time enables us to approach the question of whether bloggers are journalists and what freedoms they have by looking at concrete examples. With cases from the last 5 years all involving blogs, we can explore how society’s view of bloggers has changed over time, how blogging and journalism are viewed in countries other than the United States, and what civic issues and other common elements come into play.

One of the most well-known cases that spurred the debate on press freedom for bloggers is the Apple vs. Does case in November 2004, where Apple filed a subpoena on fansites that published leaked information about a then-secret product. This cases and several more are detailed and analyzed in their respective pages listed at the right.

In the past few years, bloggers and the act of blogging has become more mainstream knowledge and has become increasingly understood among judges and lawyers. Bloggers are part of a general “new media” that is increasingly considered to fall under the journalism umbrella, alongside online news, social networking, and ranking sites.

Countries differ in their approach to bloggers because they have different ideas of free speech in general, ranging from the relative freedom that the US enjoys to pressure and arrest from politicians to outright censorship. Bloggers often have it easier than traditional journalists because they can be relatively anonymous and independent of a news institution, allowing them to be more daring and controversial. The themes of many of these articles are themes of journalism, not blogging in particular: both can be and have been overridden by political regimes and criminal investigation.

Bloggers are now often treated just the same as journalists in cases where they would otherwise play an ambiguous or confusing role. However, there are still many boundaries between the categories of blogging and traditional news, for example, Google does not consider blogs to be news sites.

Bloggers are capable of good and evil, as demonstrated in these cases. They can serve as an outlet for free speech where traditional news will not suffice, by supporting individualistic messages, creativity, political dissent, and whistleblowing. However, the nature of anonymity and content personalization on the Internet encourages defamation and illegally leaked information, respectively.

Blogs have their share of limitations, as described by Cass Sunstein in the book Infotopia:

Even the best blogs lack anything like prepublication peer review, and their speed and informality often ensure glibness, superficiality, confusion, and blatant errors. (186)

A particular problem arises if people are reading blogs that conform to their own preexisting beliefs. [. . .] People sometimes go to extremes simply because they are consulting others who think as they do. (188)

However, bloggers are increasingly starting to fill a unique and necessary role in the journalistic and democratic process. These cases illustrate a diversity of roles for bloggers in citizenship and dialogue.