Court decision: Blogging is a trade and bloggers are journalists.

Blogging is such a new word that if you start typing this in a Microsoft Office Word program, such as the one I used for this post, it shows up as misspelled.

In fact, many people probably still don’t know what a blogger or a blog is. At least that’s what Judge William J. McCarroll wrote in a recent decision.

The reason this judge got interested in blogging is that a blogger had been arrested when he covered a public protest. The public had stormed a public meeting and lots of people had been arrested, but not the journalists.

Apparently, the police didn’t buy the blogger’s story that he was really a journalist. But the judge did.

In his decision the judge wrote, “I believe it’s fair to say that the defendant was doing nothing wrong at the time he was approached by Sergeant Parks and placed under arrest. He was simply plying his trade, gathering photographs and information for his blog alongside other reporters.”

You can read his blog here.

What is important about this case is that here we finally have a legal precedent.

A blogger isn’t just a blogger.

He is, according to Judge William J. McCarroll, a journalist.