Good questions. You’re right that this is a very important point. I’m primarily going off the interpetation of the bill in Charlie Savage’s NYT article from the end of October:

“The compromise grants no protection against a reporter’s being required to disclose the identity of someone who has engaged in an act of terrorism. Nor does it cover nonconfidential information, like unpublished interview notes or news footage that has not been televised, which are often the object of subpoenas. The House version of the shield bill would protect such material, and abandoning that provision was a chief concession of the bill’s Senate sponsors and news organizations.

“There was compromise on both sides,” said Paul J. Boyle, senior vice president for public policy at the Newspaper Association of America.”

—

Having gone back and looked at the actual text of the bill, I would have to say that I think the language here is *very* unclear, and even more, I can’t say I know how exactly this procedure would work in practice. It remains to be seen, too, what the final language of the bill would be. In general, I think there are a few aspects of the bill that haven’t been much discussed, which I hope I can get to in a future post.

I just listened to your interview on the latest episode of “On the Media”:

http://onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/11/06/08

You mentioned there that the current version of the shield law protects only information that makes it into the story — but that reporter’s notes containing info that did not make it into the story might not be subject to shield protection.

This seems to be a pretty important point. The version of the draft legislation Nieman Labs published Nov. 2 (http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/11/shield-law-definition-of-a-journalist-still-up-for-grabs) does not appear to specifically mention notes (as far as I could tell). Could you explain more about this aspect of the legislation?

- Amy Gahran

Interesting findings. My only question is why you buried the interesting part the bottom of the post? This blogland man, you gotta shirk those academic writing habits (that’s a euphemism for boring). We are not grad students, which is to say say you can’t compel us to read this stuff. You gotta make it spicy dude. Hell, just give the ole’ inverted pyramid try, it’s as good a starting point as any.
-Matt