Blogging as News?
A clip from the Danish daily Information (in translation - for your convenience) :
Yahoo: Blogging as News
In the United States the extension of blogs is somewhat greater than in Denmark. For instance, it has been discussed in Congress whether bloggers should enjoy the same rights as journalists. While the search engine Google recently launched a separate blog search (blogsearch.google.com), the competition, Yahoo, tackles the problem in a radically different way. Yahoo has included blogs in their news search (news.yahoo.com), so that private blogs will appear alongside news from the New York Times and other ‘real’ media. It is no matter of surprise that the decision has caused great controversy concerning the difference between private individuals’ interpretation of the news and the work of professional journalists. /nt (Oct. 14, 2005, pp. 14/15).
posted by Christine I at 8:44 PM
2 Comments:
The last sentence of the piece of news Christine posted, about private individuals’ interpretation of the news and the work of professional journalists, brought to my mind this blog:
http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/finlanddiary/
The weblog format itself allows the presentation of both "groups'" interpretations (since the readers can send in comments) - and in the blog in question the postings and the comments formed an interesting combination: it was not only "ordinary people" commenting the texts of journalists, but also how the journalists tried to find out things about a different society & culture than their own, Finland that is, and those sending in comments largely were from that culture i.e. Finns. In my opinion this created a strong tension between the texts and the comments, which I found interesting.
This was just an example that came to my mind (and the blog might be interesting to read for those of you who found little hattivattis in yourself while staying in Tampere... :).
Thanks for the link, it's an interesting case, and true enough: whether news should be written/edited by amateurs or professionals would hardly be a question of either-or. If a main dubious thing about blogging as news is the lack of peer reviewing or formal editing at the initial point of publication, it is obvious here how readers/users might try to compensate for this at the level of commenting.
Concerning editors and corporate blogs: Does anyone know about guidelines for professional journalists blogging. Can the blogosphere in general be considered a forum for private individuals? I mean, does the weblog format itself imply that only the blogger himherself (and not an employer) can be held responsible for the contents of a blog?
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