Justin Crawford: Notes for his talk
As I mentioned, Halloween morning my colleague Justin Crawford and I are giving a talk to a class of journalism graduate students at the University of Colorado on the amorphous topic of blogs and citizen journalism. Here are some notes for Justin's talk, What are blogs and why should you care?...
According to Gawker.com (4.2 million unique visitors monthly): "The short answer: the new stuff is always at the top of the page! Also, we have no pretensions to objectivity -- no editorial board, no assigning editor, and no delays. We publish in real time. Weblogs are biased, personal, and funky."
Built on framework provided by countless volunteer software engineers (open source)
Better technology lowers the expertise required to publish online. Open-source:
- Databases
- Web servers
- Content management systems
That technology framework is the primary enabler of the current amazing surge in online media (content & formats):
So when we say "blogging," we're really talking about something much bigger: Social media, conversational media, community journalism.
In fact, I'm really sick of the term "blog." It just doesn't accurately describe the variations just mentioned.
Whatever you call it, this stuff is really disruptive. And journalists need to pay attention to it.
In July 2006, Pew Internet & American Life Project did a telephone survey and found:
- 12 million American adults write blogs
- 57 million American adults read them (78% increase from the year before)
There are a few canonical examples of blogs' importance in big news stories: Rathergate, MoveOn & Howard Dean, etc. But this election season promises to trump those examples.
Time after time, bloggers have discovered news or kept news alive until major media outlets pick it up. The countless scandals that threaten GOP power in the federal government have been fueled substantially by the power of blogs to influence the national discourse.
Here's why blogs are powerful: Millions of blog authors act as "thought leaders." And each has a devoted audience contributing tips, story ideas, links. It's a lot more researchers than a newspaper staffs.
Journalists, then, can take advantage of this network just by reading blogs, or using tools (such as we'll discuss later) to "subscribe" to blogs.
- Journalists get all the horsepower of millions of researchers...
- ...but retain their unique role: to research unsubstantiated tips, establish credibility and truthfulness, and to make a story out of them
Journalists can also nurture their own devoted audience by being bloggers themselves and participating in conversations with their readers/viewers.
- This humanizes the news
- And can lead to great stories
- And it's what audiences, more and more, expect.
Blogs aren't the end of it. They're the beginning. Technology has only begun to reshape the way we communicate with one another. It's a great time to be in the information field -- if you're quick.
Questions:
- Who reads blogs?
- Who writes blogs?
- Who uses Facebook/MySpace?
- Are blogs really "journalism"?
- How can you tell if information in a blog is good?
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