Review on Yuxing Zheng's "Bloggers might be excluded from Oregon's executive sessions" (Oregonian, 10/4/08)

Are bloggers members of the media? This is what one political blogger in Oregon put into question after being denied from sitting in on a City Council meeting. 

I agree that trying to define the media when it comes to non-mainstream outlets is tricky. With today's modern technology, can't we all be considered bloggers? Where does the line between blogger and journalist stop? And what's the difference between blogger and citizen journalist? Is there a difference?

Judson Randall, president of Open Oregon, brings up other important questions: 

"Who defines news?" he asked. "If somebody writes a column, is that news? Is there information in there that is newsworthy you wouldn't consider news? There's all kinds of shades in there. If I were a city council, I wouldn't want to be in a position to decide that."

But something very important to note is,

"State legislators who devised the statute in the 1970s never anticipated the Internet and its empowerment of individuals to blog or disseminate news from their personal keyboards." 

 A simple solution would be to create an amendment that would clarify the older language used in the 1970s, like we have throughout history by adding amendments to the Constitution.