bloggedy blog: the personal weblog of a music lover and aging punk wannabe

:: Wednesday, June 12, 2002 ::

Blogs and journalism. More introspective journalism about weblogs and the new media of online journalism from the American Journalism Review:

In "Online Uprising", Catherine Seipp writes that "the blogging revolution" has "rendered obsolete Mark Twain's famous crack about never arguing with a man who buys ink by the barrel -- and that goes for the man who buys bandwidth by the barrel, too. Who needs Slate or Salon when bloggers offer equally fine writing and more diverse viewpoints? Blogging, as (Andrew) Sullivan put it, 'means the universe of permissible opinions will expand, unconstrained by the prejudices, tastes or interests of the old-media elite.'" All the usual suspects are included in this article: Sullivan, InstaPundit's Glenn Reynolds, Virginia Postrel, etc., but it's still a nice in-depth piece on what we do. It would be nice, for a change, if reporters dug a bit deeper to contact a few of the great unwashed in blogdom. Seems it would give a broader view of blogging.

From the is-it-really-newsgathering department comes this hand-wringing about Yahoo! News. Columnist Barb Palser, who is with the journalism think tank The Poynter Institute, notes that Yahoo! News is the third most popular news site on the Net. It is "the ultimate aggregator of online media, republishing the work of about 100 news sources and organizing links to thousands more. Its coverage ranges from world and business news to local headlines and op-ed columns. It boasts breaking news e-mail alerts, message boards, photo galleries, audio and video clips, and mobile delivery. It does everything except the main thing. And visitors don't seem to mind." The irony, to my way of thinking, is that the author's own organization also aggregates news in weblog fashion, borrowing links and headlines from a host of other online news sources. In the end, however, the author concedes that the Yahoo model -- and by extension, the newsblog model -- might be a legitimate form of journalism for our times. "Yahoo! News might be overlooked in roll calls of the nation's top news sites, and it won't win any reporting awards. But its ability to reliably amalgamate and deliver information presents a challenge -- and in some respects an example -- for online journalism."

:: Andrew 07:48 + ::
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