§ 60-481 Privilege applicable when acting as journalist; not in contempt in proceedings.

If you're a journalist, this rule protects you from being punished for keeping your sources or information confidential. Courts, government agencies, lawmakers, or any other official body with subpoena power cannot hold you in contempt just because you refuse to reveal where you got your information or what that information is, as long as you got it while doing your job as a journalist.

This protection isn't unlimited, though. There's another rule, K.S.A. 60-482, that lists exceptions to this privilege. So while journalists generally have strong legal cover to protect their sources, there are specific situations where that protection doesn't apply.

In practical terms, this means if you're a journalist facing a subpoena asking you to name a source or hand over notes, you have a legal basis to refuse, and you can't automatically be jailed or fined for contempt just for saying no. But you'll want to check the exceptions in the related rule to see if your situation falls outside this protection.