March 29, 2005
Blog, Blaw, Blog, Blaw, Blog…Is Blogging Journalism?
http://www.cmaq.net/en/node.php?id=20409
Michael Hull, Friday, 25/03/2005 - 19:01
Analyses | Democracy
The latest question to that has concerned credibility in journalism is the “authenticity” of blogging as a form of journalism? When it comes to this question it all depends on whom you ask and how they view blogging; blogging is interpreted as not to be journalism by political economists, but journalism by cultural theorists.
The reason political economists seem to sway away from the idea that blogging is journalism is because blogging is too practical for average citizens and political economists don’t want that. Political economists think that there are certain characteristics required to be a journalist: funding (must be a job), audience (newspaper or TV), credentials and “objectivity”. If this were all to be true, then how come there media bias and control has become such a hug problem in the 21st century? The same reasons that make a journalist according to their definition are the same reasons blogging is more of a form of journalism. Within the sphere of journalism, because a newspaper or television station is paying them, their opinion will be restricted to that of their editor or boss. When it comes to credentials, they are used to get journalists a job; we also know that credentials don’t necessary lead to objectivity either.
I must side with cultural theorists on the topic of blogging because it offers the average person room within the public sphere to give their critical opinion. I trust someone who is not getting paid or censored by a network more then I trust a journalist; it is the system that has failed journalism, not the people who have consume their information. The Internet has enabled everyday citizens the ability to see through “false consciousness” and learn from each other. While journalism is based on the system giving the public information, blogging enables the public to give the public information, since the system discredits blogging as a form of journalism. Blogging does offer personal agency, but there is more to it then that, we have to know how the majority of the public consumes blogs. A lot of citizens trust daily news more then blogs, but it is the people who are aware of the corruption of the system that write blogs.
The Blogosphere has been around since 1997, but it starting to have more of an impact now because of the international turmoil created by the US government. It is blogs that can give the average citizen the hope of objectivity in news, since mainstream media has become so unreliable. One can only wonder if the medias’ control of information will ever extend back to the fundamental idea upon which media was founded: democracy.
Submitted by Anonyme
.... is it blogging journalism ???
Author: jotaesse
Date: Sunday, 27/03/2005 - 07:12
Isn't important if blogging is or not journalism...
it's important that blogging is the democratic-citizen media with their own opinion !!!
Posted by icianita at 05:27 PM | Comments (0)
March 17, 2005
The Gendered Politics of Blogs?
In the March 21 Newsweek, Steven Levy wrote an article about Blogging Beyond the Men's Club:
March 21 issue - At a recent Harvard conference on bloggers and the media, the most pungent statement came from cyberspace. Rebecca MacKinnon, writing about the conference as it happened, got a response on the "comments" space of her blog from someone concerned that if the voices of bloggers overwhelm those of traditional media, "we will throw out some of the best ... journalism of the 21st century." The comment was from Keith Jenkins, an African-American blogger who is also an editor at The Washington Post Magazine [a sister publication of NEWSWEEK]. "It has taken 'mainstream media' a very long time to get to [the] point of inclusion," Jenkins wrote. "My fear is that the overwhelmingly white and male American blogosphere ... will return us to a day where the dialogue about issues was a predominantly white-only one."
After the comment was posted, a couple of the women at the conference—bloggers MacKinnon and Halley Suitt—looked around and saw that there weren't many other women in attendance. Nor were the faces yapping about the failings of Big Media representative of the human quiltwork one would see in the streets of Cambridge or New York City, let alone overseas. They were, however, representative of the top 100 blogs according to the Web site Technorati—a list dominated by bigmouths of the white-male variety.
Does the blogosphere have a diversity problem?
In the March 17 Alternet, Chris Nolan (a female) writes about Ten Reasons for Too Few Female Bloggers:
1. This medium was first taken up by techies. Most of them aremen. It's not worth going into the statistics on men and women in tech, and the reasons and whyfors. There are more men, that's all you need to know for this conversation.
2. Those men prefer to link to and read men like them. As it was in the beginning so shall it ever be. When they wonder where the women bloggers are, what they're really saying is "I don't read any women bloggers."
3. Even though the "blogosphere" has gotten much larger, most of these men are still reading the guys they started out with three years ago, linking to them and talking among themselves. There's talk of broader horizons, but it's pretty much that: Talk. Glenn Reynolds, however, is an exception to this trend. And since he got slapped around last month, Kevin Drum has started to link to more women. Josh Marshall rarely links to women writers. Dave Winer is also stingy.
etc etc .. read the rest online...
Posted by shade at 12:01 PM | Comments (0)