Retrieved from "Gabriel Weinberg's Blog: Startups and Stuff." August 29, 2011
In
the last post about the greatest things on the Internet I mentioned how social
media, multisourcing and information sharing "allow us to live and
participate more actively in the growing global community."
Whether
one considers blogs part of social media, as a new form of journalism or just
an online journal or portfolio, they have undeniably come to shape the way
humans communicate and produce content for mass publication, “linking” people and
groups together and creating spontaneous forums across borders.
Blogs
have democratized writing and, some dare to say, journalism, in the sense that every
person with a computer and Internet access automatically becomes a reader, a
critic and a potential writer, editor and publisher.
This,
many believe, results problematic.
Not
only is indiscriminate publishing dangerous because not all types of content
should be widely available for the world to see, but also because—as many
pundits across platforms have consistently denounced— blogs have the potential
to deviate attention from formal, organized, regulated journalism to seemingly
more frivolous portals of mostly opinion sharing.
However,
we should analyze things more slowly before making such a far-reaching
argument. Only then will we come to see
that neither are blogs displacing journalism nor are the two so incompatible
that they cannot coexist in today’s world.
Why?
Mostly
because blogs and journalistic articles serve different purposes, in most
cases, and because some of the differences pundits cite between the two often
become similarities.
Andrew
Sullivan, in his article “Why I blog,” published by The Atlantic magazine in
2008, embarks in the task of telling the history of blogging and how it functions,
irremediably establishing a comparison with journalism.
Problematically,
although Sullivan starts off trying to reconcile the two, he ends up
overestimating the blog’s capacity to engage in a personal conversation with
readers while at the same time oversimplifying the blog’s content when compared
with their print homologues.
In
many stances when talking about the complexity of content, the production
process, the effort and responsibilities involved, Sullivan leans toward saying
that blogging is less complex and journalism is more exclusive, deviating from
his initial premise—that they are not antagonists but complementary.
Although
effective in making distinctions between blogs and articles, Sullivan fails in
providing characteristics of blogs that do not at the same time apply to
journalistic pieces.
As
a journalism student and an avid reader of the press I find hard to believe
that organized journalism does not “air a variety of thoughts or facts on any
subject in no particular order other than that dictated by the passing of time,"
as Sullivan implies when describing blogs, and that journalists are
incapable of engaging in a conversation with their audience, as Sullivan seems
to emphasize when he ponders that "a sort of conversation often develops
between the blog’s readers and its author(s)."
Granted,
there are many stages to go through that make journalism and publishing in an
organized medium a more complicated process, but journalism can be as
spontaneous as blogging, after all, it is precisely the events that happen as time passes what dictate the front pages and overall content of newspapers globally.
In the decision and editing process, even in straight-news, objective, balanced stories, journalists give away their personalities and biases through the word choices they make, the phrasing they use and the overall theme of the story. These themes and approaches spark the conversations Sullivan believes are exclusive to bloggers. If this were not the case, accusations of "journalistic" or "media bias" would probably rarely be in the public's mind, even less in its growing weariness for journalists.
In sum,
Will journalism end because of blogging? No.
Will blogging displace journalism? If ever, probably not for a very long time.
Can the two coexist as homologous is the interconnecting, globalizing world? Yes! They must, mainly because they cater to different needs.
As with what is the future of journalism and blogging we will just have to wait and see how they converge and absorb (or are absorbed by) the different social media channels that have come to dominate the world online.
Esther Daniela Castillejo
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