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Richard Campbell: The difference between what's going on in the blogging world-- where we have millions and millions of new bloggers, with their opinions-- and sort of, old-style, traditional journalism, it's complicated. And I think one of the things that the blogging world has brought to journalism that's very interesting, is they're acting as sort of another check and balance on journalists themselves.

So you have bloggers out there looking at traditional journalism, and actually fact-checking. I think this is a great thing that's come to journalism, that you have this whole world opened up to journalism. That's scary to your traditional journalists, because there's now a watchdog watching them. They are used to being the watchdog.

Frank Lomonte: The First Amendment, even though it speaks in terms of freedom of the press, hasn't really been interpreted-- except in very limited circumstances-- to give any more rights to a person who is on the staff of a newspaper and owns a printing press, than someone who, let's say, has a website, and is a blogger. The First Amendment protects speech by the individual speaker, as well as the institutional speaker.

Joe Urschel: Bloggers are protected by the same laws. They're also subject to the same laws. The same libel laws would apply to a blogger. However, there's a greater deal of anonymity on the web. It's very easy to find a reporter at the Washington Post. He's got his name right on his story. You know the address of the newspaper, you can walk right over and lay a subpoena on somebody. But how do you find an anonymous blogger out there in the blogosphere?

Frank Lomonte: There's one body of law. And it is the same body of law whether your medium is a piece of paper, or a computer screen. And so the same rules apply in terms of, you can't put somebody under covert surveillance, and take their photo, and use it in a way that invades their privacy.

You certainly can't defame somebody by publishing false information that's injurious to their reputation, or their career. All those things hold equally true online as they do on paper. And people can, and do, get successfully sued if they exceed those boundaries.

Richard Campbell: So that said, I think this is a really exciting thing. That it's very, very hard for journalists, anymore, to get away with plagiarizing, to get away with making stuff up. It's so easy to get caught now, because you have lots of people, lots of citizen journalists, out there checking the traditional media. And watching over it.

Joe Urschel: If you believe that a proliferation of ideas and a multiplicity of voices is a good thing, which I do, then I think the idea of blogging, and partisan publications, whether they be printed or digital, they just add to that-- as the old cliche goes, the whole marketplace of ideas.

It may require you to be a more creative consumer than you ever had to be before, because you have to be able to be more sophisticated in the way that you look at the veracity of information. How can you distinguish between something that's accurate and true, between something that's fabricated and manipulative?

People who consume news products now, I think, need that higher degree of analytical thinking and skepticism. Because there really aren't that many sources around that are operating on the traditional model of fairness and accuracy, in the new media and this new world of digital delivery.