Wednesday, December 06, 2006

[RN_Grp4] bloggers, journalists

A simple premise: most bloggers are not journalists, but the reader doesn't care. As long as it looks informative and/or shows (or even strengthens) some empathy to my views. Newsworthiness for the humble reader is that simple, as apart from what the jornalists would like to think. Things like objectivity and crediblility are some nice options to make the news more newsworthy, but other 'virtues' such as empathy and sheer speed of the information can outweigh them in some contexts. The overall news discourse space of a society overarches the whole array ranging from the gossips to the journalistic articles to deeper formal analysis. While traditional journalism specialized itself to the narrow array of the standardarized news article, bloggers are all over the spectrum.

Thus, it is not the case that 'blogs' are some things or not. Blogs are just a form of networked communication (fundamentally, it is nothing more than just an easy-to-update webpage!), that has become so technically sophisticated that it can also be used for functions that was thought before to be only possible for trained journalists in a solid commercial media organization. Rather, it is the use pattern of the blog writers/readers that is to put focus on. The role of social news and opinion production has been spread to a wider pool of its members. It is no threat to the readers, only to the journalists.

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