The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has just posted on its website a legal guide for those who regularly report and comment online—whether they think of themselves as journalists or not. "If you are gathering and disseminating news and information in any medium, this guide is for you. It will be as useful to bloggers as to a staff reporter at a national newspaper," says the introduction.
If the guide has an obvious limitation, it's that a good number of the issues it discusses are, at least for Californians, governed mainly by state laws, which it does not address. But in its design to support online reporting and commentary, the Digital Journalist's Legal Guide is an invaluable supplement to, for example, CalAware's Journalism Law in California.
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