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House Bill 257 offers college student journalists participating in news gathering or disseminating in a college-supervised capacity the same shield law protections afforded to professional journalists in Maryland, the bill's sponsor, Delegate Sandy Rosenberg, D-Baltimore City, said last month.

The bill passed unanimously through both the Maryland House of Delegates on March 4, and the Maryland Senate on April 1.

Shield laws typically allow reporters to protect their confidential sources entirely, and protect any notes or unpublished materials unless disclosure is deemed legally necessary. The law in Maryland currently protects journalists "employed" by news organizations.

"The key is that those who are not paid but in a supervised activity, and there's specific language in the bill with regard to that supervision, those are the people who would now have the protection of the shield law in Maryland and hopefully in other states as well," Rosenberg said.

The law in Maryland is unique because it currently offers protections based on employment by the news media, not a definition of a journalist, said Jack Murphy, executive director of the Maryland Delaware DC Press Association.

"We thought it was important to cover college students who are doing serious reporting and are, often times on big projects, having to grant anonymity or confidentiality to their sources," Murphy said.

The bill's language extends protections to those "employed by the news media in any news gathering or news disseminating capacity," or to anyone "enrolled as a student in an institution of postsecondary education and engaged in any news gathering or news disseminating capacity recognized by the institution as a scholastic activity or in conjunction with an activity sponsored funded, managed or supervised by school staff or faculty."

The "news media" covered by the bill currently includes "newspapers, magazines, journals, press associations, news agencies, wire services, radio, television and any printed, photographic, mechanical, or electronic means of disseminating news and information to the public."

Rosenberg said he hopes the Maryland bill will set the stage for others to pass similar legislation.

"I would hope that other states would follow suit," Rosenberg said. "While each bill is different and each state is different, I think we were able to do this the first year we introduced it, which is the exception to the rule in the legislative process, because [of] the back situation in Chicago and also because it's a very logical extension of the shield law. It's very logical to extend it to college reporters."

Rosenberg has previously cited the issues involving the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. as a catalyst for his bill. The school hosts the Medill Innocence Project, run by Professor David Protess, which attempts to use investigative journalism as a tool to reexamine criminal cases where there is evidence of a wrongful conviction. Northwestern received a subpoena last year, in connection with his students' investigation of a murder conviction, which requested all notes, electronic communications created for the course, grades of the students working on the case, a copy of the course syllabus for the Innocence Project class and receipts for expenses incurred during the investigation, among other materials.

Rosenberg said that he had tried in the past to introduce legislation that would protect bloggers with no success, but that pending Congress' decision on a federal shield bill, he would consider making another attempt.

"I will reintroduce my legislation adding bloggers after the Congress passes a federal shield law that includes bloggers, because then you'd have that precedent," he said.