The Internet has given journalists the opportunity to instantly provide information and news to the public. The Internet has also given the public the opportunity to respond to the information they receive. And somewhere in the middle blogs have found their nesting ground.

Blogs have become popular outlets for journalists and the general public and take many forms that include a wide variety of topics. But what is the role of blogging in journalism? Steve Outing, a writer for  Poynter Online has written about what journalists can learn from bloggers and what bloggers can learn from journalists. He highlights the benefits of blogging (occasionally considered “citizen journalism” depending on the blog), as well as provides words of caution to bloggers who don’t have journalistic backgrounds, particularly warning against libelous blog entries.

So what is the role of blogging in journalism? As a reader and a journalism student, anything I read in a blog I take with a grain of salt. If I’m doing research and I stumble across information in a blog, I try to find a more concrete source that provides the same or similar information. It’s not because I don’t believe what I’m reading. It’s because if I am researching a topic, I want to be sure I am crediting a reliable source, not someone who passes off his or her opinion as fact.

That being said, with so many professionals (either journalists or professionals in a specific field such as medicine or law) blogging about so many topics, it’s relatively simple to find a vast amount of information, with different points of view, on a variety of issues.

Blogs also have a lot to offer that traditional journalism doesn’t. Blog posts appear in chronological order with the most current post at the top. One of the benefits of this is that correction posts appear at the top of a blog when a reader visits the page. I consider this to be a form of transparency that isn’t as obviously apparent in print and broadcast journalism. Newspapers have been known to print a story on the front page with information that is inaccurate or incomplete and later print a correction, but the correction ends up buried somewhere behind the first page where many readers won’t see it.

Another form of transparency that blogs offer that traditional journalism doesn’t is the freedom of opinion. Outing describes this idea as “news as conversation” and in terms of personality. Whereas what Outing describes isn’t in terms of transparency, he discusses how this type of “conversation” takes place when bloggers offer their opinions concerning a certain topic, which in turn creates conversation between the blogger and followers. Personality also makes these conversations successful because the writing tends to be more engaging than a straight news story.

Many journalists have already embraced the fusion between traditional journalism and blogging. And though this has been successful and popular for a number of journalists and consumers on the Internet, I remain skeptical about collecting “news” from blogs, regardless of who writes them. Maybe as more time passes I’ll become more trusting of what I read in blogs. In the meantime, maybe reading with caution isn’t such a bad thing.

Over at the journalists’ resource PoynterOnline, Al Tompkins recently did a post on the shift underway in photography toward video and the DSLR as the must-have gear.

Tompkins does a mini-interview with photographer Ami Vitale, who says this is a great time to be a photojournalist. (Clearly she hasn’t heard that journalism is imploding.) She explains:

We have more tools available than ever before and we also have an audience bigger than anytime in the history of mankind. It’s powerful, and I’d like to harness these tools and use them to communicate and create understanding in a complex world where messages are so easily misunderstood. I see this as a wonderful time to exploit all these tools for the power of good!

But as a commenter points out, the price of upgrading to remain competitive can be prohibitive, if not downright impossible, when you consider the Canon IDMK4 costs about $5,000. Most newsrooms certainly don’t have this money, and if it falls to the individual, then it seems photojournalism will increasingly be about economics.

Article via PoynterOnline

Poynter Online - July 31, 2009
by Joe Jackson

I was surprised last August when I was able to claim my full name on Twitter. Other Joe Jacksons, from a well-followed English musician to enthusiasts of disgraced former baseball player Shoeless Joe, had already beaten me to various domain names and e-mail accounts. So perhaps I should have seen a case of mistaken online identity on the horizon. [Read more]