{"id":52134,"date":"2016-09-30T11:27:00","date_gmt":"2016-09-30T16:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/content.findlaw-admin.com\/ability-legal\/supreme\/legal-commentary\/how-the-ongoing-transitions-in-journalism-may-affect-the-first-amendments-marketplace-of-ideas.html"},"modified":"2016-09-30T11:27:00","modified_gmt":"2016-09-30T16:27:00","slug":"how-the-ongoing-transitions-in-journalism-may-affect-the-first-amendments-marketplace-of-ideas","status":"publish","type":"supreme","link":"https:\/\/supreme.findlaw.com\/legal-commentary\/how-the-ongoing-transitions-in-journalism-may-affect-the-first-amendments-marketplace-of-ideas.html","title":{"rendered":"How the Ongoing Transitions in Journalism May Affect the First Amendment’s “Marketplace of Ideas”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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How the Ongoing Transitions in Journalism May Affect the First Amendment’s “Marketplace of Ideas”<\/h1><\/td>\n <\/tr>\n

By JULIE HILDEN <\/h2>
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Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2008<\/td>\n\n <\/tr>\n <\/table>\n\n\n\n\n

This year has been a tremendously difficult one for print journalism and print journalists alike. The industry suffered widespread layoffs, and newspapers’ stock prices dropped significantly — with some flirting with or even entering bankruptcy, or considering the sale or mortgage of key non-media assets. Some of the bad news has arisen from bad economic times, but much of it represents the acceleration of a transition that seems likely to be permanent: Advertising dollars are moving from newspapers to the Web – and rather than simply moving to newspapers’ websites, they are moving to a variety of other sites and services as well. These include free websites, such as Craigslist.org, that threaten to replace the paid classified advertising that once was a strong source of revenue for newspapers. They also include paid services such as Google Ads that seek to carefully tailor an ad’s viewers to its content in ways that a simple list structure, or a set of fixed categories, can never replicate.<\/p>\n\n

In this column, I’ll consider how First Amendment values may be affected by the media developments we’ve seen so far in 2008. The Supreme Court’s ideal of the First Amendment’s “marketplace of ideas” is that it should be “uninhibited, robust, and wide open” – as Justice Brennan wrote in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan<\/em>, which famously recognized and addressed the First Amendment dimensions of defamation law. Here, I will argue that the transition taking place in journalism is likely to promote Justice Brennan’s ideal in the long term, but inhibit it in the short term. Indeed, in the short term, with the transition artificially rushed by the recession, serious free speech costs are inevitable.<\/p>\n\n<\/span>\n\n\n \n

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