The problem is often framed -- wrongly -- this way: Do bloggers count as journalists? For example, the New York Times "Room for Debate" feature is titled "Are All Bloggers Journalists?" The description of the online forum asks, "How should judges decide who is protected and who isn't?" Kelli L. Sager, a First Amendment lawyer participating in the debate, writes, "Because most laws were written before the Internet existed," she explains, "they often refer to then-existing media -- newspapers, magazines and the like -- or simply to 'journalists,' without defining who is a journalist." The central framing is always "who is a journalist" -- who, who, who. The question of protection always rests on the question of who the person is that is committing the act of journalism. Is this person a journalist?

The idea that press freedom is about protecting journalists is anachronistic, something we have pasted onto an older idea. When Thomas Jefferson wrote about press freedom, the idea of a professional journalist didn't exist in any modern sense. His ideas were motivated by the dual legacies of licensing and censorship. In the 17th century, censors regulated presses so tightly that only licensed printers could operate and they could publish only books explicitly approved by the queen. For Jefferson, a protection for a particular, favored business would have smacked of exactly the sort of licensing scheme he was trying to avoid.

The Supreme Court has constantly displayed an aversion to privileging a class of reporters with rights that regular citizens do not have: New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), the defining case on libel, applied just as much to the four clergymen who were being sued as it did the paper of record. ("Analogous considerations support the privilege for the citizen-critic of government. It is as much his duty to criticize as it is the official's duty to administer," Justice Brennan wrote.) In Branzburg v. Hayes (1974), the only time the Supreme Court has considered the concept of a shield law, the Court declined to create one.

The age of the institutional media today looks like a flash in the pan, an aberration from the more-normal mode of citizen publishing. It's not something we should seek to preserve artificially through laws. When we do, we end up trying trying to divine principles that can help us draw lines between journalists and everybody else. Well, what is their practice? we ask. Do they have sources? Do they have notebooks? Does this person look like a journalist?

These questions are good proxies for the ones we mean to ask: Does this information aid us as citizens? Does it help us understand government, or help to right some wrong? It's the quality and content of the information that matters to press freedom, not the people spreading it. The "who" proxy will work nine times out of 10, but for the sake of that tenth time, we should try to ask the more central question of "what" the information is that's at stake.