living, thinking and writing
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Wednesday, March 30, 2005 News media or news? No news medium can afford not paying attention to bloggosphere nowdays. Newsweek starts a ‘blogwatch’ column every week, ‘a weekly mainstream-media snapshot of what’s hot (or what’s not in the ever-widening world of weblogs. Inside politics at CNN contribute several minutes or so (used to be 20 minutes, not sure how long now) every day talking about what’s in bloggosphere, drawing analysis from blogpulse. The implication is the same, mainstream media reports on what happens in bloggosphere. I think it is a very smart redefinition of the dynamic of blog and mainstream media. It is such a norm today that blogs challenge main stream news by disclosing more inside scoops, therefore snatching audience from TV to computer. Sure, Blog is a medium, so is every human being; as long as you are a channel of communication you are medium. Thanks to the Internet, a personal blog became a mass media (sort of), but still, saying bloggosphere is a kind of news media really overturns the journalism study for the past two centuries. I used to be a journalism student and a journalist for a very short time, a decade ago (wow, time flees). I still remember the time when I was a feature writer, how much work and human resource has to put in for a news story, endless phone calls, the disturbing number of read marks from editors that overwhelm my original writing…What I learn from those years is, news, for the need of, if not the truth, the fact, is collective work. What one person says is news, but it can hardly make this person a news medium. And that’s how I feel about personal blogs. It is really not a competitor to mainstream news media; instead, it can and should be a great complement for news sources. News media has been accused for long for their elite-dominated news sources, a.k.a, the senators, the statesmen, the professors, together with some very anecdotal accounts of Joe of Wisconsin, or Jose from Santa Anita. Now, bloggosphere make life easier for reporters to find out what millions of average Joe or Jose say and think. The trick is how to find this fragmented information dispersed in the infinite internet, and how to present them in a comprehensive and representative manner. As a former and short-lived journalist, I wish my research can be a help to news reporters to generate information about real public opinion in the public sphere. posted by lmeimei @5:39 PM| permanent link| | |
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