"When Montana blogger Crystal Cox lost her defamation case in 2011, the decision was greeted by a chorus of cheers from journalists, who were quick to argue that Cox wasn’t a journalist in any real sense of the word, and therefore didn’t deserve any protection from the First Amendment. An appeals court for the Ninth Circuit has disagreed, however: on Friday, a panel of judges overturned the original decision and said that Cox was in fact entitled to protection.The implications of this ruling go beyond just a single defamation case. It’s another link in a chain of decisions that are gradually helping to extend the principle of free-speech protection beyond professional journalism to anyone who is publishing information with public value — and as such, it helps shift the focus away from trying to define who is a journalist and puts it where it should be: on protecting the practice of journalism, broadly defined.
Legislators who have been trying to design a “shield law” for journalists have been doing their best to specify who should be protected from government interference, but as journalism professor Jay Rosen and others have argued, it is the content itself that requires protecting, not some specific group of professional journalists who are able to fill in the correct checkboxes."
Source
http://gigaom.com/2014/01/19/on-free-speech-and-blogging-the-first-amendment-applies-to-everyone-not-just-journalists/
Keep in Mind that David Carr, New York Times and Forbes GOT IT WAY Wrong
See Cox v. Carr
http://ia601708.us.archive.org/31/items/gov.uscourts.nysd.411955/gov.uscourts.nysd.411955.2.0.pdf
Cox v. Hill, Forbes
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bzn2NurXrSkiME55Ynk2VnE2anM/edit?usp=sharing