By Lorna Bracewell
PoHo contributor

In a presidential proclamation issued on Monday, President Barack Obama officially recognized the month of June as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month.

LGBT Americans have made, and continue to make, great and lasting contributions that continue to strengthen the fabric of American society. During LGBT Pride Month, I call upon the LGBT community, the Congress, and the American people to work together to promote equal rights for all, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.

The president’s call for equality and his acknowledgment of the many contributions LGBT people have made to America’s culture, society and politics despite being culturally, socially and politically marginalized are truly moving. However, I can’t help feeling slightly ambivalent about the whole thing. Here’s why:

Unlike many in the big gay blogosphere, the root of my ambivalence is not the excruciatingly slow pace at which the president has pursued formal equality for LGBT people. Rather, it’s the order in which things seem to be happening. It seems wrong to me that LGBT people have been given a month before we’ve been given civil rights.

That’s not the way things happened for African Americans. They officially got their duly deserved month in 1986 when Congress passed Public Law 99-244. This law required the president to issue a proclamation recognizing Black History Month, which had been privately observed since 1915. Then President Ronald Reagan obliged with a document that reads quite similarly to Obama’s LGBT Pride Month proclamation.

All of this happened some 116 years after the passages of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, the amendments to the federal Constitution that abolished slavery, guaranteed equal protection of the laws, and enfranchised all males regardless of race, and 22 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, a federal law that went a long way toward making the abstract legal rights guaranteed by those amendments substantively meaningful for African Americans.

In short, African Americans got their rights first and their month second. It is almost Orwellian that the many achievements of the LGBT civil rights movement are being extolled while LGBT people are still being denied the most basic civil right of marriage and are still prevented from serving openly in the military.  Let’s hope history-turned-on-its-head doesn’t repeat itself and force us to wait 116 years for formal equality.

Jim Johnson is the creator of The State of Sunshine blog.

Last month, I wrote a post here on Political Whore about US Airways flight 1549, which landed in the Hudson river with all aboard safe.  The first images where not from a major news organization or a photojournalist, they were from a bystander and were disseminated via Twitter.  It eventually prompted a response earlier this month from Michael Hussey at Pushing Rope with an interesting discussion about news.

In his post, as well as a follow-up, and the comments to both of them (here and here), Michael makes some very good points.

First, he shares my concerns about the current evolution taking place in the news industry:

I care about who will cover Tampa’s business and metro “news.” That won’t be bloggers going out there to report for free. The lack of community news coverage affects the quality of life and people we elect. Jefferson hated the Fourth estate, but he knew it was important.

Second, he rightfully argues that using new communication tools such as blogs or Twitter does not suddenly mean we are producing journalism. I see a difference between the message and the medium – new tools can be used for journalism, but not always.

In fact, the discussion of Twitter and journalists was taken a step further by Dave Poulson, a guest contributor to the Poynter Institute and Associate Director of the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University. Poulson wrote of the interesting Twitter happenings during Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm’s State of the State speech:

Something happened Tuesday night that has me again thinking of the journalistic dimensions of Twitter.

I tuned in an Internet broadcast of Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s annual state of the state speech because it was expected to be laden with energy and environment issues. On impulse I logged into Twitter and asked my followers if there had been a hashtag established for the speech. There was: MiSOTS (Mich. State of the State).
…

Meanwhile, many, many, many other people used this hashtag to challenge points, support points, do some partisan sniping, question assumptions, add perspective, speculate about what was going on, and provide links to supporting information — including a transcript of the speech and the opposite (Republican) party’s response.

Poulson does say he isn’t sure if this is a “cool” fad or the wave of the future. I would say the latter.
The future of news…
Poulson goes on to find a role for journalists with Twitter: Perhaps a news organization could become become popular for spotting hashtag opportunities and quickly spreading the word. It might also try tracking down tweeters of interesting comments for traditional interviews.

The same could be used for blog posts, podcasts, and more. Especially, when you consider Wayne Garcia’s post a few days ago:

Google’s senior vice president of product management, Jonathan Rosenberg, wrote on the Google blog recently his take on what modern news media should be all about. He argued that the days of hoarding information are over (huzzah and cheers from me on that). He offers a techno-optimist pledge to find a way to monetize good Net information gatherers and distributors (journalists, experts, researchers, etc.) with a utopian “free the information and it shall set you free” vision.

You can see that Poulson and Rosenberg are offering essentially the same advice: news organizations offering a new service as “aggregators” or “filters” and providing analysis. This kind of service will be something organizations can monetize through online subscriptions, providing funding for the one thing crowdsourcing can’t do: investigative journalism.

To me, that will likely be the primary future of news organizations.

Right now, “uncompensated Internet activity” is protected by a Federal Election Commission regulation that allows linking to campaign websites and writing about the views of federal candidates—which, without the regulation, could potentially be considered a campaign contribution or expenditure on the candidate’s behalf. Basically, blogs currently share the same protection from campaign finance restrictions as other media outlets.

The problem is that since this protection is regulatory, it can be changed without congressional action. Rep. Hensarling will introduce legislation that will create statutory blogger protections in the hopes of creating a more permanent solution for our online “pajama journalists.” Forge on, brave bloggers!

A defense attorney’s law license is at risk because he posted an angry description on the Internet of embattled Broward Circuit Judge Cheryl Alemán, calling her an “evil, unfair witch.”Last week, as Alemán was on trial for alleged misconduct before the Judicial Qualifications Commission, The Florida Bar signed off on its finding that Sean Conway may have violated five bar rules, including impugning the judge’s qualifications or integrity.

In the Halloween 2006 posting on a blog, Conway denounced Alemán for what he said was an “ugly, condescending attitude” and questioned her mental stability after, he says, she unlawfully forced attorneys to choose between unreasonable trial dates or waiving their clients’ rights to a speedy trial.

As those who have joined the Florida Bar or run a judicial campaign know well, there is no such thing as free speech for lawyers or judges. Wouldn’t want to taint the justice system with the truth and all that.

Broward has been the site of a lively trade in courthouse online bashing.  Back in May, the county’s chief judge complained that a lawyer blog was undermining his authority in the courthouse along the banks of the mighty New River.

Broward County has several interesting and snarky lawyer blogs, including the one complained about above (JAABLAW Blog) and  South Florida Lawyers, which not only has references to Sandy D’Alemberte’s daughter posing for Playboy in 1991 but a photo of The Skipper himself.

Why doesn’t Tampa Bay have such exciting lawyer-bitching vehicles?