Blogging: A Revolutionary Media

caught in the moment
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Blogging & all its online components has been a growing trend for the past few years.  Thanks to Facebook, Flickr, Technorati, & Wikipedia, the online atmosphere has attracted a growing audience from numerous age ranges.  Since the creation of Xanga, I have enjoyed the aspects of these social networks.  It wasn’t until college that I began to hear the negative aspect of these networks.  Despite these negatives, I believe that these social networks are a positive force in media because they do not have to follow a certain code of ethics, like the SPJ or PRSA, they are wonderful tools to find & follow information free of a shareholder bias, & if they weren’t such a force other big businesses wouldn’t see online media & its networks a threat.

In college, aspiring journalists are taught to be objective & to adopt a personal code of ethics.  They are also encouraged to join a type of journalistic association.  Once one joins an association, they must adhere to that association’s code of ethics.  If what the journalist wants to report on goes against the code, the journalist must suffer the consequences for their actions.  In the case of the PRSA, they will get kicked out of the association.  In contrast, bloggers & others who use the online media to “report” on stories, don’t have to follow a guide.  They can say what they want to say without having to worry about an editor looking over their shoulder & critiquing their work.  Since these bloggers aren’t getting paid, the aspect of not having a code to follow allows bloggers to report on the stories that traditional media refuse to or simply cannot cover.  The ability of online media to be able to publish these stories drive more people to look to the Internet for their news.  The blogger’s allegiance is to themselves & to the reader, not a bunch of shareholders.

 Sites like Wikipedia have gone under severe scrutiny because these applications allow just about anyone to post & edit content & with the notion that anybody can create a website comes the question of credibility.  But one must remember that even newspapers publish false material & because they are newspapers, many people take what the publication says as the truth.  In reality, it is the truth to the extent of what the shareholders want their views to be.  Mr. Mike Henderson recently lectured on the negatives aspects of large corporations buying small papers.   Here is a snippet from the article I wrote in response to his lecture & a few readings:

“Dispatches From Blogistan” also pointed out that “Wikipedia contained no more serious errors than the venerable Encycloppedia Britannica, particularly for scientific or technology-related topics.”

Online media is becoming a formidable force.  So formidable, that traditional media are beginning to put their content online & even allow some stories to be commented on.  Giants like NBC’s Today Weekend show are trying to develop their own online blog, while The Seattle Times began selling online classifieds to compete with craigslist.  One knows they are popular when others try to copy you.  Bots that “run” Google News have also affected how journalists write their stories.  50 years ago, I doubt that journalism teachers were telling their students that a more straightforward headline would allow more people to view & access their online article.  The article talked about how the invention of the telegraph prompted writers to use the inverted pyramid style journalists are taught today.  Now, bots who were created to get the gist of the article from searching it for key terms, make writers write straightforward headlines or in some cases to write two different ones: one to attract the reader & one to make it more search-able online.

Social networks are becoming an important aspect of society.  They are different from traditional media & networks since they don’t have a code of ethics to follow, they aren’t under the control of shareholders so the content is easily-accessible & easy to find, & they have influenced traditional media to the point where traditional media wants to imitate it.  With the Internet being the new force to be reckoned with, I wonder what the traditional media do to stay afloat.

 Questions

1) If social networks didn’t arise, what would have society done to counter the growing need for person-to-person interaction?

2) What are traditional media trying to do to counter the growing movement to online media? (EX: Craigslist.com is taking away business from newspapers.)