Slashdot Mirror
Blogging for Dummies?
Guinnessy writes "Wired News reports that one of the most respected journalism schools in America is going to be teaching blogging as part of next semester's course. I find this quite interesting, especially considering the existing controversy over whether blogging, such as Slashdot, is real journalism or not. I still haven't made up my mind." "Blog" now takes the cake as the most ill-used word of 2002. Please draw distinctions between webpages with news, mindless link propagation, discussion sites, personal diaries or journals, etc.
Newspapers are believed do to credibility and for the most part unbiased reporting. Credibility can be established by reporting accurately, truthfully, and by keeping current with the events. Slashdot has a bit of sensationalism along with opinnions and sometimes unreliable sources that prevent me from believing everything I read on it. If a person can establish themselves as reliable source of information then I believe a blog can be true journalism.
Who in their right mind would call Slashdot a "blog"? Blogs to me have always been personal journals. Slashdot is more professional than personal, though it doesn't fit well into either category. Maybe it's just that I find /. useful, and journals self-centered and annoying. =P
Off-topic? =)
"I'll say it again for the logic-impaired." -- Larry Wall.
Blog is just a stupid word.
Another crap word of the year.
Kuro5hin might rank as journalism. Not very good journalism in my opinion... Slashdot on the other hand is seldom anything more than a news cutting service with the occasional editorial comment. (more often than not the editiorial comment is more ignorant than the trolls...).
A "blog" is an online diary. Just because it's a "journal", doesn't make it journalism, by the practical definition. Hopefully, this school is teaching the difference.
My first reaction is: "Great, just when I thought the trend of whining bohemian teenagers was on the decline, more fascinating online drivel about how the Offspring sold out". Rethinking it, though, maybe the internet will take more shape as a source of alternative media. Televised news is a joke, newspapers almost all suck (besides the Indypendant or the National Review, I can't think of any worth a read), the clearchannel or the radio, whatever it's called, is getting more silly by the day...maybe a large group of "bloggers" seeking out stories and drawing the lines between them will form a perfect source.
I mean, the WTO protests in Seattle a few years ago had TV/radio/Newspapers reporting protestors rioting, and cops using almost no force against them. Personal accounts contradicted this and soon after, video and photos turn up on the internet of cops firing rubber bullets into crowds of people sitting on the sidewalk, tear gas canisters flying and even one cop ripping someone's gas mask off to pepper-spray(?) him. Who would know, if not for the fact that individuals spread the word independantly, that quite a few innocent people had been lumped in with the couple of assholes that kept showing up on CNN?
You can't take an individual's opinion as fact, but the same could be said of major news outlets. Similarly, you can't expect those major news stations to fess up when some stories don't add up, or are mysteriously omitted. If enough people start reporting what they see, eventually we'll get a much larger idea of what is really going on around here.
"most respected journalism schools "
I dont know about you... but I dont have much respect for journalists - nor berkeley...
I find that journalists have about as much integrity as lawyers and politicians. I guess thats why those groups run the world... little cunning bastards that do anything for a buck.
First of all, Michael is right..."blog" has become extremely overused, much like "P2P." But that's besides the point.
Merely linking to news does not equal journalism. Slashdot isn't journalism. Kuro5hin isn't journalism. Yahoo's Full Coverage site isn't journalism. Hell, Fark isn't journalism. They are link farms. They find and post links to actual news stories across the world. While this makes for an easy-to-read digest of news and information, it does not mean the site becomes a seeming bastion of original journalism.
Real journalism, IMHO (speaking as one), is going out, researching a story, interviewing people, and putting together a concise unbiased story (keep your media bias arguments until the end of class kids). Journalism is not posting a link to a news story elsewhere, and then adding your own personal opinions or thoughts. While the Berkeley school is trying to avoid this, putting a "blog" label on it won't make any difference. Major news sites, like the New York Times and the Washington Post already post their news to the Internet in real time. Some even include "Comment on this story" links as well.
Take away the personal opinions and rambling links, and you don't have a so-called "blog." You have an online news site, just like the big boys. Calling it a "blog" doesn't give any more "hipness" or credibility.
I wish everyone would get over this stupid "BLOGS ARE THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM" crap. You know what? They aren't.
--
The real Raunchola isn't cool enough to have any imposters
What literary authorities have defined "blog"? It does not yet appear in the online version of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary or at dictionary.com
If it's not in either of these places yet, who's to say what definitions are right or wrong?
The reason you cannot count Slashdot as a BLOG is because it is the original BLOG that grew into a community. Most Blogs will only be simple journals. I remember trying to tell my dad about Slashdot way back and told him it was like reading the newspaper and submitting your letter to the editor in a matter of seconds with other people commenting on you letter to the editor within a few minutes. He responded "so it's total chaos". That's when I decided I had no idea how to explain slashdot.
Zoid.com
That a journalist's work has to first pass through the scrutiny of his peers and his editors is a key factor in assuring the quality of published information. Blogging might be journalism, but it's Rambo-style -- one man for himself, whatever he writes, gets published. When you're talking about something like the BBC, CNN, or the Wall Street Journal, letting reporters publish on-the-fly might give individuals too much control over what sort of information makes it to the public.
Now with the Internet growing as a major distribution point for news, perhaps the future will bring us a merger of 'traditional' journalism and web logs: real-time news that, while still going through the standard editing channels, is published as soon as it's put in. The idea of releasing news each day may fade away from the Internet entirely, leaving us with news sources that publish news as soon as it happens. It'd be one more (small) step towards a truly networked form of human civilization.
Re their integrity, sure--there are some bad apples in every bunch. However, one way journalism is like science is that journalists' output can be checked against the real world. They constantly check up on each other, not out of altruism of course--possibly the reverse, but as long as it works...
As for teaching them to blog or use computers in any way, I don't envy the teachers. Journalists, like lawyers, politicians, preachers, writers, and some/most teachers (the "word-oriented professions"), live and work in a conceptual world that is non-physical.
There seems to be a natural antipathy between word-oriented professionals and machinery. Most word-oriented professionals could, or imagine they could, do their job as well in a non-technical society as in ours. I think it derives from the ancient Greek division between philosophy and work.
This is only a theory. But if you've ever tried to provide tech support to a bunch of reporters you know it's about as easy as convincing cats to become amphibious.
This is a bit of a sore point for me, because the dictionary makers in my native language, French, constantly try to impose ridiculous rules on the language. For instance, "chat" has taken hold as the French word for Internet chatting. But the Academie Francaise, in its infinite wisdm, declared the artificial word "clavardage" (a hideous mutant splice of the French words for "keyboard" and "small talk") to be the Pure French Word to replace it. The worst part is that some people have begun to use it. We shouldn't ascribe that kind of power to the so-called "authorities".
How the editors seem to think that everyone who reads the post automatically knows what they're talking about. How many others had no idea what "blogging" meant?
That's not necessarily a bad thing.
It doesn't take an in-depth analysis of the news story to make journalism. It only needs to be true, correct, and competently addressed even if it's little more than a footnote.
Not everything in a newspaper is a front-page story, you know? News companies have limited space and resources to create and publish those marvellously researched pieces you're so fond of. There are also columns, socials, and those collections of AP/REUTERS notes that you find almost as a margin to the "big news" and compose 90% of what's happening in the world.
"Online news sites" are similar to these last. They condense information as much as possible while trying to give a non-misleading picture of what it is about (and usually fail), so that interested readers can do their own research and find out more.
Blogs with active comment systems are a mix of these with "open-eds" and "letters to the editor".
But Blogs may also be more than just a collection of links. While Slashdot follows this pattern, it's mostly because that's what it does best and/or what the community values (witness the popularity, on the other hand, of Jon Katz).
Kuro5hin, for example, follows more closely the pattern of a magazine or publication. MLPs are similar to the link collections (or AP notes), while the rest of the site is often populated by articles where the links are secondary to the argumentative content... which is in some cases not entirely about the current emotional state of the poster. Original content that is not a substitute for group therapy is possible in a blog, after all.
The advantage of blogs is that they provide an immediate source for the reader to do their research, so they don't necessarily have to accept the incomplete, inevitably misleading piece of news they were given. Users can interact with each other and with the author exchanging sources of research, and even correcting intentional and unintentional errors in the article.
The disadvantage is that, being posted by amateurs, they degenerate into diaries with links... that is, a throughly unentertaining and unresearched "opininion column" on electronic media.
Communities formed around these throughly biased weblogs (witness Slashdot), and will react against the removal of that bias because it gives them "a sense of community". They enjoy the non-journalistic flavor of the blog, but that does not mean a journalistic endeavor cannot benefit from the blog format. Rather, it means it must resist the temptation of pandering to the public which is probably greater than in other formats because of the greater level of feedback.
A journalistic "blog" should not foster that bias and would probably be unable to provide any "sense of community" while being competent in the journalistic sense, but one or many biased communities could be "resident" in a journalistic blog, though, much in the same way Clans or Guilds are specific to some online games.
I agree with you, though. Blogs are not the future of journalism, nor should they be. Hyperlinks are the future of journalism and should be the present; Blogs are just one of the ways of getting that into the heads of stubborn journalists half a century too late.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
Some get interesting, if the person has a clue.
Most are run by little whiny anti-social hosers who just sit and complain about how bad their life is and how humanity sucks.
You don't have to be a Kreskin, but more than likely, no one gives a flying fsck about your cat or what you did today. (See also: Pointless waste of valuable bandwidth.)
'Blog'. From 'Web-log'. The 'log' of which derives from shipping navigation. Sailors would throw a lump of wood - the 'log' - into the water and watch it float past to measure the ship's speed. This was written in a book every day, which became called 'the log'.
'Journal'. From the latin 'Diurnalis', meaning daily. A record kept daily, like a diary, which probably evolves from the same root - latin 'dies', meaning 'day'.
'Journalism': The collecting, writing, editing, and presenting of news or news articles in newspapers and magazines and in radio and television broadcasts.
It seems that somehow people putting their journals on the web via a web-log got all up themselves and decided they were 'journalists'. Errr no. Writing a journal does not make you a journalist these days.
The UCB course mentioned in the article looks more like it will teach on-line journalism, but they've buzzworded it with 'blogging' as a PR exercise. These guys know PR, you see.
Baz
Blogging, it would seem to me is an irrelevant term. Journalism and blogging are synonymous. Slashdot has as much right to calling itself journalism as any other periodical. The difference is that one is professional (they make money), and one is amateur.