Blogs and anonymity - another News conspiracy?

Mr Massola offered a commentary on his earlier piece while his colleague Lara Sinclair wrote a straight up news story based on the “threatening and abusive” tweets that followed Mr Massola’s Monday piece.

Also on Tuesday, to support its journalists in their endeavours, the newspaper ran a short leader under the sub-heading “why should web writers escape scrutiny and responsibility?”

Indeed, this is a very good question and one which has been the subject of debate in the communication and media departments of universities for some time.

It is not, however, news, though the timing of The Australian’s coverage was important.

It coincided with a separate story that the Labor-Greens Coalition government had nicked the media “shield law” that had been proposed by the Liberal-National Coalition and were to table their own beefed-up version in the House next week.

The bill will offer protection for those who provide information to “employed” journalists and to the journalists themselves - it will not protect bloggers nor will it protect their sources.

The importance of the differentiation between sources attached to “employed” journalists and those attached to citizen journalists - many of us who contribute to On Line Opinion are citizen journalists and bloggers - should not be under-estimated.

Anonymity was once a vital component of publishing, even in democracies. A dissident writer in England in the early 18th century, for example, required anonymity when writing about certain issues to avoid a flogging, or worse. Fortunately for modern democratic societies the flogging is now confined to a bunch of trolls on Twitter unleashing invective if they disagree with an opinion.

Witness some in the twitterverse slagging out Mr Massola for his outing of Grog.

The question of the differentiation, however, remains alive.

It also raises other questions about the relationship of the old media paper/broadcast model and the new media online model of news gathering and news dissemination.

In its defence of Mr Massola, The Australian leader stated that Mr Jericho had injected himself into the political debate and was therefore “fair game” - the same as newspaper columnists and by-lined journalists are fair game.