A Time of Magic

Most of the time I’m sure that you don’t really think about where a particular blog that you might be reading is actually published.

Why would you? After all, for a general article the main difference that you’d notice would be that a British/Irish/Australian/New Zealand blog would say “colour”, an American/Canadian one “color” and other related differences. Aside from that there would be differences in the sports talked about and the news agencies referred to. However, by and large in a general post you would barely notice where it had been written so long as the author was a native English speaker.

However, there is one major difference that we experienced (”we” being me and Wendy) late last week when we received a call from the police telling us that we were in contempt of court. That particular concept doesn’t exist in the American legal lexicon thanks to the First Amendment but basically means that you’re not allowed to “publish” details of an ongoing court case where there are “reporting restrictions” in effect.

But what does “publish” actually mean? Up to now there’s been something of an ongoing debate about whether or not bloggers could be counted as journalists. Aside from anything else, if they weren’t journalists then legally they couldn’t be publishing anything, could they? Well, apparently we ARE journalists now or at least are being treated by the courts as though we were part of “the media”.

Curious as to the case that triggered this? Well, since this particular blog is published in London I can’t tell you about it…