Gag Rules? Bloggers Report Anyway

from the of-course-they-do dept

First brought up by Dan Gillmor in his blog and now followed up by a story in Wired News, is the fact that the recent Wall Street Journal "D - All Things Digital" conference had a gag on journalists, telling them they couldn't write about what any of the speakers spoke about. However, there was no similar gag on bloggers. The simple fact of the matter is that the idea of restricting "journalists" no longer makes sense when everyone is a journalist. This is the same thing as last week's news that SCO was trying to ban journalists from a discussion about their lawsuit. It's not as if this information isn't getting out there. To their credit, the organizers of the Wall Street Journal conference say they don't have a problem with the bloggers who posted stories from the conference. They agree that they were under no such restrictions. However, they may rethink how they set the conference up in the future. Unfortunately, this probably means a gag order on everyone rather than admitting that this information is going to get out anyway - so it might as well be publicly done.

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