Pro Bloggers to get Journalist Shield.
Last week, the House Judiciary Committee approved a bill that would shield journalists (including bloggers) from revealing their sources . However, the bill includes several exceptions regarding terrorism, national security, imminent death, and trade secret leaks. More ominously, it was amended to define “journalist” as someone who receives “financial gain or livelihood” from their work. That would exclude an awful lot of citizen journalists.

News Nets To Allow Use of Presidential Debate Footage
ABC, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, C-SPAN and NPR have all agreed to make their presidential debate footage available for relatively unrestricted use on the Web and elsewhere. Only Fox News still declines to do so. CBS has not yet carried a debate.

News Corp. Plans to Sell Ottaway Newspapers
Rupert Murdoch said today that he plans to sell the Ottaway newspaper group he’ll acquire with the purchase of Dow Jones. That’s probably good news for James Ottaway, who was amongst the most vocal critics of the DJ sale.

Freakonomics To Appear Under the Banner of the New York Times.
The New York Times has announced that they will be hosting the Freakonomics blog. Recall that the authors of Freakonomics had postulated in their book of the same title, that the drop in crime in the 1990’s was due to the availability of abortions post Roe v Wade. In other words, had the women who had those abortions not done so, their children would have grown up to be criminals.