If someone is doing an investigative writing with the intention of publishing it in any format, regardless of what that person has done in the past, or how that person customarily occupies their time, they are a journalist.

Blogger-journalists as equals doesn’t begin to cut it. In some small towns there are a number of women who call around on the telephone and spread the news and in a most significant way, they are journalists, too.

Sacco and Vanzetti were on the train attempting to escape capture for distributing pacifists pamphlets, so they thought, when arrested. They were executed without one shred of evidence, other than Sacco being short of an alibi to prove his innocence.

Of course, they wouldn’t have been on the run in the first place if they had believed that one of their cronies captured with the pamphlets had jumped out rather than thrown out the window to his death during interrogation.

The First Amendment is absolute, equal to all, big, small, rich or poor. It does not belong to corporate America.

Brian Williams is a great journalist and as we know, he was a selected guest at last week’s State Dinner. That is corporate, giant American media being schmoozed. But how about the little old grandmother in Wyoming who is barely getting by with her most sincere devotion to publishing a country paper with less than 1,000 circulation?

What is the chance that someone who has scraped together a few hundred dollars to send from his MacBook in PDF format pages to be printed on newsprint next month not to be considered a journalist while attempting to collect his or her news for the first issue?

Or, for that matter, if he or she printed out one page on their laserjet and distributed door-to-door next month. If they are in the process of gathering news or to print opinion to distribute at some future time, they are a journalist right now.

That is, if we still have a democracy and a Constitution.

What Near v. Minnesota means to me is that no matter how thread bare, financially desperate, morally insolvent, sleazy, ill-motivated a publisher of some slimy little weekly, that the rights of a journalist prevail the same as with the mighty New York Times, Boston Globe, etc.

The poorly dressed reporter showing up taking pictures with his telephone has just as much right as NBC. That is the First Amendment, pure, clean and simple.

It used to be darn hard if not merely impossible to start a competitive newspaper. There was a time, perhaps illegally, when a competitive start-up daily could not contract to receive AP and UPI news.

In your home town, perhaps within a decade of when you were born, there was a weekly start-up, around 1960, and the Old Codger, not a bad person overall, went around to the advertisers and told them if they advertised in the new start-up they could not advertise in the Gazette. The uncertainty of success of the new weekly, leaving a merchant without a place to advertise, was enough of a threat to starve out the new weekly.

The new frontier may not be a daily or weekly on newsprint – although that is the case in New Hampshire right now, but establishing who qualifies as journalist is horribly dangerous to a democracy.

That said, have any of the other candidates been asked where they stand on a federal shield law?

J. M. Near never would have received his professional bona fide journalism distinction, nor was he someone who set a standard as an ideal for the rest of us to follow. Thanks to justices such as the famed Oliver W. Holmes and Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, and the Chicago Tribune’s Colonel McCormick’s financial support, the First Amendment was preserved in a narrow decsion in the 1930s.

I know: in this case we’re talking about the possibility of harassing some little fly-by night activist newspaper publisher out of business through court intimidation, rather than requiring a license to publish but to me it is the same kettle of man-eating fish.

I could go on and on and on and on about how stupid and shallow Martha’s comment really is, but I think that would be stupid because I doubt that most of the rest of us are as dumb as horribly shallow as she.

I agree, but defining journalism will be just as contentious as the term “journalist” seems to have become in this new media world.