BY NOEL K. GALLAGHER
MaineToday Media, Inc. Saturday, January 13, 2007

"I am excited about it," said Dutson, who runs a Web site design company out of his Searsmont home and blogs at www.mainewebreport.com. "It's an interesting and positive development and shows a pretty progressive attitude toward the changing media landscape."

Media Blogger Association, a 1,000-member group that got two reserved seats, will rotate Dutson and other members through the seats for the 6- to 8-week trial that begins Tuesday. Several individual bloggers have also been credentialed, a court official said.

"I have been working with the folks at the federal judiciary for over a year to create this opportunity," association President Bob Knox wrote in a post this week on www.mediabloggers.org. "Behind this may be many additional opportunities with the federal and state supreme courts so getting this one right opens up the door to many other cool things. Other institutions will surely be looking at this as well."

The bloggers will be limited to seats in a media overflow room, which Knox said he requested, since they couldn't be guaranteed seats in the courtroom itself and because the media center would have wireless Internet access, allowing them to file updates throughout the day. The trial is expected to draw unprecedented attention at the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, which set up the media center for the first time to meet media request demands, said Sheldon Snook, administrative assistant to Chief Judge Thomas Hogan.

Libby, former chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, is charged with perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with the leak of the name of then-active CIA operative Valerie Plame. Cheney is expected to testify.

"We view this as a trial. By giving credentials to five or six different bloggers, it will give us a good sense of how this works," Snook said. "The chief judge and our (information technology) committee have always appreciated the advantages that technology can bring."

The decision to give bloggers credentials sets no precedent, Snook said, since federal judges decide media rules on a case-by-case basis.

But it adds to the ongoing debate about the fuzzy line between traditional media and bloggers, particularly "citizen journalist" bloggers who do actual reporting work, as opposed to the vast majority of blogs that are either commentary or "diary" style musings. According to Technorati, a blog-tracking company in San Francisco, there are already at least 63.2 million blogs online, with more than 175,000 new blogs added every day.

"The critical thing is the work that people are doing, whether they're called bloggers or journalists" said Bill Mitchell, editor of Poynter Online, the online arm of The Poynter Institute, a continuing education program for journalists. "If they are gathering news, then I don't think there's any particular reason to deny them access. If it's a matter of space, then people have to make that decision. But I certainly wouldn't exclude bloggers for their lack of affiliation with a media company."

Dutson said he hasn't ever been excluded from an event or denied access because he was a blogger, but he's emboldened by the court's decision.

"After the trial, I'll be pushing to test my access to stuff in the state of Maine and having had this experience is going to make it easier to make the arguments that I be allowed access," he said. "It's been a long road to gain access to people and get people to return calls and to have them look at the merit of the information and not the medium."