Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Can blogging replace the main stream media?

On Club Troppo, Don Arthur has been debating the question as to whether blogs can replace newspapers as a source of reporting. Don thinks not. For your information, the posts in date ordre to this point are:
As with the issues I covered in Facebook's decline?, I have written a lot on this issue over the last few years because the topic interests me.

Let me cut straight to the chase. Blogging cannot replace newspaper reporting. That's not its role.

As a regular blogger, I think of myself as an analyst and commentator. I also reserve the right to follow the purely personal. I do report sometimes, but only when I think that there is a gap that should be filled. When I do report, I try to be factual, not merely opiniated.

I spend a lot of time on some of my stories, often more than a reporter can working to rigid deadlines. As much as possible, I try to give links to original source material. I also generally, perhaps too often, give links back to past posts so that people can check what I said before. Yet I cannot replace the normal working journalist for a purely practical reason.

Within time, I can only do so much. Even if there were hundreds of bloggers like me, and there are not, we simply cannot replicate the daily reporting grind.

What we can do, and this is something I tried to explore a little recently in The political rise of the bloggertariat, is to act as a review mechanism in a way the normal press cannot. The plurality of the bloggosphere helps here.

I think that's a useful role.     
 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Jim

Nothing to do with your subject, but a point of frustration I wanted to record.

I've been reading Denis Wright's blog, in the "proper order" - i.e. first to latest.

He seems roughly same age as me, with a similar childhood, so I identify with quite a lot of his writings.

BUT it's an absolute pain in the proverbial which could be solved by either 1) providing a reverse date sort button (to put each group of posts into "proper" date order) or 2) at the very least repeat the "Older posts, Newer posts" buttons at the top of each page as well as the bottom.

Geez, I'm getting old and grouchy.

kvd

Jim Belshaw said...

You know, I don't know how to do that myself, KVD. That's why I sometimes put post lists up to show related posts starting with oldest first. I must do some more pages, too.