SAN JOSE, Calif. – Every day I make the usual rounds checking on the news of the day: look at four newspapers, some television, listen to the radio, peruse the Internet. Then I go blogging.
Did he say jogging?
No, you read it right. I go blogging.
If you want to see a blog, just search the Internet. I assure you the results will be mind-boggling.
I often find the best stuff, the kind you might talk about all day, on the blogs, one of the latest facets of the online journalism game.
San Jose Mercury News columnist Dan Gillmor, one of the pioneers of the blog – also known as the weblog – said that, in general blogs are personal online journals, updated regularly, featuring links to Web material.
Here at the dawn of the 21st century, blogs are undergoing an explosion of popularity, and there are somewhere between 200,000 and 500,000 out there in the Internet newsstand.
The personal blog is used to receive and disseminate information on specific topics to communities of interest. For example, most journalists I know regularly check Jim Romenesko’s MediaNews, which contains the latest news and gossip of the American news world. It often includes memos placed on company bulletin boards just minutes before.
This fall the University of California-Berkeley will offer its first course on weblogs.
With its array of breaking news, personal opinion, court decisions, speeches and other documents and updates, blogs are the bearers of news often adding context and insight.
For example, during the war in Afghanistan, some blogs printed letters from American soldiers and Afghans as well as links to the standard reports from war correspondents.
“Weblogs are a different form of presenting news and information and I think it’s intriguing and worth exploring, said Paul Grabowicz, a former investigative reporter and director of the New Media Program at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.
Students in the two-unit class will launch their own blog in November.
One of the aspects the students will be looking at, Grabowicz said, is intellectual property and copyright because a critical part of the blog is a link to a traditional news site or other copyrighted source.
“By its nature, weblogging is about linking,” said Grabowicz who along with Wired magazine co-founder John Battelle, will teach the course.
The heart of the blog, said weblogger Dan Brickin, is in the person who operates it and his or her e-mail correspondents.
“Weblogs like mine aren’t traditional journalism in the sense used to describe an Associated Press news feed. They are individuals, sometimes individuals with particular knowledge or background, describing something or commenting upon things they see. . . . Letters from soldiers aren’t the same as reports from correspondents, but they are valuable nonetheless for understanding what’s going on.”
Already a debate is growing among bloggers on the growing interest from the established media, which many feel tend to homogenize or slant news presentations.
The New York Times calls the blog the return of the pamphlet in which one has complete freedom of expression, something not always possible in establishment journalism.
Blogger Andrew Sullivan wrote that the weblog brings in fresh points of view.
“With a couple of exceptions, the established newspaper market is dominated by left-liberal editors and reporters. What the Web has done is allow younger or more talented writers to bypass this coterie and write directly to the audience. . . . Blogging is the first journalistic model that actually harnesses rather than merely exploits the true democratic nature of the Web.”
Weblog pioneer Gillmor writes: “A million webloggers and e-mailers here and around the world won’t replace today’s news organizations.
“But they bring something to the news that wasn’t possible before the Net. They bring, to those who are receptive, alternatives.”
