I put this up here to extend a conversation I've been having on my own blog about what, exactly, we're trying to protect when we in media angst about saving the news industry from its impending apocalypse. What is journalism? My answer was somewhat half-baked, admittedly, and Dana hit on the main problems in her responses, but I want to push back in a few places.

If news executives don't get their act together, Dana and Eben are correct to allege there will be no such thing as "Press." But I have a little more faith in their ability, or at least some of them, to innovate out of the industry's current funk. More importantly, I see a social cost to having our news-of-record delivered as Speech rather than as Press. There is different information and different analysis that emerges when I go in search of information as a reporter than when I do so as a citizen-blogger (and for the record, I do both); there are questions I can ask, people I can access and most importantly, a mindset that I fall into in my professional mode that aren't there when I leave the newsroom. The best explanations of why Press is more than the sum of its participants are Nick Lemann's "Amateur Hour" and Jon Chait's "The Left's New Machine." I am trying to preserve and protect THAT set of practices, and to the extent that the old First Amendment is dead, I think it's what the new one should do. I am arguing for the intent and work of reporting as something that has to be demonstrated BEFORE you get the rights of Press--it is an earned, not an innate, privilege. So you can't just say, "Well, really, I was out looking for a natural disaster the day the tornado happened." Does that mean my model is inherently unequal because it privileges incumbents? Yes. Am I okay with that, even though I'm an aspirant still trying to break INTO the industry myself? Yes, because I think the institution of The Press matters more than my individual desire to become a journalist.

The fact that non-journalistic sites like FB have been subjected to libel lawsuits is part of the problem I'm addressing, so I'm not sure how referencing those undermines my argument that the law needs to be clarified to prevent that by making evident that these sites are Speech. The relative cost distinction between suing FB and suing the NYT will evaporate over time, so this issue will become more, not less, important.

Yes, Dana, when the Constitution was written, the Press was the physical printing press. But we've long abandoned the idea of literal interpretations. As I understand it, the intent of the Free Press clause is to preserve the distinction between professionally produced content and amateur produced content. At the time, this was a technological distinction; now that it's not, I think we need to reinterpret the clause to maintain the distinction within the digital universe, NOT, as I think Dana is suggesting to welcome the distinction's demise. That way lies anarchism, and I'm certain the Constitution is not, and shouldn't be tweaked into, an anarchist text.