One in three bloggers regard their work as journalism according to a new study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Although Apple has now dropped its law suit against Think Secret et al., one of the key issues was whether bloggers are journalists and enjoy the same rights as more traditional media.

Pew Internet’s ambitious study which covers the demographics, motivation, activity, audience and technology of bloggers found that most bloggers write to be creative or express themselves. (Apparently journalists don’t do this).

Only a minority engaged in what the survey called “journalistic activities”:

Oddly, several important journalistic activities are missing. On the one hand there’s nothing about a thirst for the truth or a commitment to the public interest. On the other, no mention of a knack for pounding out product placements as if they were reviews, taking care not to upset companies that advertise in the same enterprise and writing whatever the editor serves up whether they know anything about it or not.

It is unfortunate that the survey is not very reliable. While the survey concludes that 12 million people in the USA maintain a blog, it only conducted telephone interviews with 233 of them and the self-declared margin of error is +/- 7%.

It also seems untroubled by the semantic can of worms opened up by words like blogger and journalist open up.

Still, if you are interested in the snapshot of bloggers that the survey offers, you can download a 33 page PDF summary of its findings. blogging, bloggers, survey, journalists, demographics

Speaking of bloggers, plagiarism and content theft, earlier today high profile Mac blogger John Gruber posted news of a site that had completely ripped off Daring Fireball’s CSS and design.

The site looked like this:

Click image for a full-sized view

The only changes, John noted, were the removal of his name and copyright statement from the code.

By tonight the look of the site had changed . How the change happened I do not know, whether by natural contrition or some form of self-regulation among the blogging community.

In his apology the blogger said that “the site was meant to be a sandbox (test) site and was not supposed to [be] public-facing.”

He continues: “My apologies mostly to John – for not asking permission to tinker with his code and also to his readers – for any confusion.”

Daring Fireball is a very fine source of Mac news and opinion. Its Linked List elevates “human aggregation” to an art form. You can subscribe to the site , not only supporting John’s own writing but keeping alive the greater dream that quality can succeed in the online world.bloggers, content theft, plagiarism, intellectual property, Internet, daring fireball, apple, mac

It’s been a topsy-turvy time for the reputation of bloggers.

First, Jonathan Bailey at Plagiarism Today posted a thoughtful piece on bloggers, intellectual property and plagiarism.

Borrowing a phrase from Dan Zarella’s post on the same theme, he wonders whether some bloggers are anything more than “human aggregators”.

He describes the growing number of “grey blogs”, that stand somewhere between content creation and content theft:

These sites, which for this article I’ll simply call “gray”, are generally identified by a large number of very short posts, with much of it in block quotes or otherwise directly lifted content. Though they meticulously credit their sources, bowing to more traditional rules for blog attribution, and work to add at least some original content, usually over half of their material comes from other sources.

The situation is made more complex, he suggests, by the fact that there are many shades of grey blogs. Still, he claims, there comes a point at which grey blogs overstep the mark, and “get away with content theft under the guise of legitimate attribution”.

He proposes a list of seven guidelines to sift the shades the grey and preserve quality writing on the Internet. Without some form of action, he fears that “high quality writers will have little motivation to post their works on-line and, as the well slowly dries up, there will be less and less work available for either reuse or for simply reading.”

This is an advance on the usual, tired “Journalists good, Bloggers bad” debate. Tony Long, my favourite curmudgeon, is fond of regarding bloggers as weeping pimples on the chiselled jaw of Real Journalism, or “self-absorbed ramblers” , not only content thieves but — what’s worse — content thieves who can’t string a sentence together or spell worth a damn.

At the other end of the reputation spectrum, everyone with an Internet connection must now know that Apple has lost a court-case which is being reported (or misreported? ) as a “Victory for Bloggers” which accords them some of the same rights enjoyed by journalists when it comes to the protection of their sources.

The many posts I’ve read on this topic seem able to negotiate the semantic minefields here with hardly a second thought.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation was particularly upbeat :

“In addition to being a free speech victory for every citizen reporter who uses the Internet to distribute news, today’s decision is a profound electronic privacy victory for everyone who uses email,” said EFF Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. “The court correctly found that under federal law, civil litigants can’t subpoena your stored email from your service provider.”

Journalists, content thieves or just hacks?

My suspicion is that in this buzzword-compliant age, the role of the new media is overdone. All three exist as abundantly in print and traditional media as they do in the blogosphere. Readers still need to be as discriminating and sensible about what they read as ever.

So go and read Daring Fireball , or Red Sweater or Betalogue or 43 Folders or something.bloggers, blogs, journalism, standards, plagiarism, content theft, grey areas, intellectual property, apple, hacks