The+Role+of+Blogs+in+Creating+News

Group Members
Alex Smith Carly Steffos Elmer Fudd Rachel Burritos



Blurring with the mass media
Many bloggers, particularly (Carly Steffes) engaged in participatory journalism, differentiate themselves from the mainstream media, while others (Rachel Burris) are members of that media working through a different channel. Some institutions see blogging as a means of "getting around the filter" and pushing messages directly to the public. Some critics worry that bloggers respect neither copyright nor the role of the mass media in presenting society with credible news. Bloggers and other contributors to user-generated content are behind //Time// magazine naming their 2006 person of the year as "you". Many mainstream journalists, meanwhile, write their own blogs — well over 300, according to CyberJournalist.net's J-blog list. The first known use of a blog on a news site was in August 1998, when Jonathan Dube of The Charlotte Observer published one chronicling Hurricane Bonnie.[19] Some bloggers have moved over to other media. The following bloggers (and others) have appeared on radio and television: Duncan Black (known widely by his pseudonym, Atrios), Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit), Markos Moulitsas Zúniga (Daily Kos), Alex Steffen (Worldchanging) and Ana Marie Cox (Wonkette). In counterpoint, Hugh Hewitt exemplifies a mass-media personality who has moved in the other direction, adding to his reach in "old media" by being an influential blogger. Equally many established authors, for example Mitzi Szereto have started using Blogs to not only update fans on their current works but also to expand into new areas of writing. Blogs have also had an influence on minority languages, bringing together scattered speakers and learners; this is particularly so with blogs in Gaelic languages. Minority language publishing (which may lack economic feasibility) can find its audience through inexpensive blogging. There are many examples of bloggers who have published books based on their blogs, e.g., Salam Pax, Ellen Simonetti, Jessica Cutler, ScrappleFace. Blog-based books have been given the name blook. A prize for the best blog-based book was initiated in 2005,[20] the Lulu Blooker Prize.[21] However, success has been elusive offline, with many of these books not selling as well as their blogs. Only blogger Tucker Max made the New York Times Bestseller List.[22] The book based on Julie Powell's blog "The Julie/Julia Project" was made into the film //Julie & Julia//, apparently the first to do so.



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=Blogs Make the Headlines= Noah Shachtman 12.23.02 It's safe to assume that, before he flushed his reputation down the toilet, Trent Lott had absolutely no idea what a blog was. He may have a clue now. Internet opinion pages like [|Instapundit], run by University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds, and [|Talking Points Memo], from leftie political columnist Josh Marshall -- were among the first to latch on to ABCNews.com's [|brief item] on Lott's racist comments during Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday bash. And they kept focusing on Lott's hateful past -- until the national press corps finally had to take notice. "Joshua Marshall, whose talkingpointsmemo.com is must reading for the politically curious, (is) more than anyone else, responsible for making Trent Lott's offensive remarks the issue they deserve to be," noted Paul Krugman in his New York Times [|column]. In a year when throngs of people joined Marshall and Reynolds -- there are now more than 970,000 registered users of Pyra's popular [|Blogger] software, up from 343,000 a year ago -- Lott's bile is one of several issues that this burgeoning community helped push on to the national agenda. In May, when pro-Palestinian activists attacked a group of Hillel students at [|San Francisco State University], the national press took no notice; there was a small mention in the May 12 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, nothing more. But bloggers -- led by Richmond, Virginia, freelance writer [|Meryl Yourish] -- piled on the story. Within days, the attack became a nationwide matter. On May 14, blogger [|James Lileks] mentioned it in a nationally syndicated newspaper column for the Newhouse News Service. Five days later, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, all followed suit with their own articles. Congruent events occurred at Montreal's [|Concordia University]. In September, Palestinian supporters clashed with riot police before a planned speech by former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Then, in December, the Concordia [|Hillel] had its funding cut by the Concordia Student Union -- allegedly for displaying a pamphlet for the Mahal 2000 program, which helps diaspora Jews volunteer for the Israeli army. Bloggers were the only ones to pay attention to these events in the United States. Despite hundreds of articles on anti-Semitic incidents in France, the confrontations at Concordia received scant press coverage. Bloggers like Reynolds and California Web designer [|Charles Johnson] focused the attention of readers on the issue. Now, Noah Joseph, a Concordia Hillel student leader, feels he's got an international network of support. "Were getting an absolute influx of e-mail -- 400 to my personal account, thousands more to a general mailbox," Joseph said. "It's uplifting to know you're not alone in all of this." Bloggers also held big media's feet to the fire when they screwed up stories. After the assassination of Dutch politician Pym Fortuyn, the U.S. press immediately labeled the quixotic candidate a clone of French neo-fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen. Bloggers, like Amsterdam-based former MTV jock [|Adam Curry], helped humanize the stereotype. How //exactly// this influenced later coverage of Fortuyn is anyone's guess. But by September, The New Yorker was running a nuanced portrait. But it'd be a big mistake to think that these Internet diarists are all supporting noble causes and high ideals. In fact, the biggest interest that bloggers seem to have is blogging itself, said MIT Media Lab researcher Cameron Marlow, who tracks such things on the [|Blogdex] website. Only items about the Google search engine and those [|cult-inducing] Apple computers seem to be able to pull bloggers away from the mirror. "Bloggers are navel-gazers," said Elizabeth Osder, a visiting professor at The University of Southern California's School of Journalism. "And they're about as interesting as friends who make you look at their scrap books." She added, "There's an overfascination here with self-expression, with opinion. This is opinion without expertise, without resources, without reporting." Maybe so, but bloggers' individualistic perspectives have allowed them to burrow deep into issues the mainstream press wouldn't ordinarily touch. Steve Outing, a senior editor at the [|Poynter Institute for Media Studies], wrote in an e-mail, "What we're seeing more and more are webloggers breaking niche stories, and thus serving as an early warning system for traditional journalists."



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Where People Go for Online NewsMarch 15, 2004 The other major audience trend in online news is that there already appears to be a shakeout in popularity among sites. Pinning down where people go is complicated. But the best reckoning suggests not only that the big sites are getting bigger in terms of audience, but also that the very biggest are becoming runaway winners. //Blogs// The structure of the Web allows all people with Internet connections to post their own site with their own observations, which has resulted in the birth of millions of Web logs or "blogs," which can be periodically updated Web pages containing a single author's thoughts. For many people, this is the most exciting part of online journalism, the promise of the Web come to life. Measuring the total number of blogs is something of an impossible task. The number is certainly in the millions, thanks to easy access to hosting services and home pages. Perseus Development Corp., an Internet survey software company, estimated that the number of blogs on blog-hosting services to be 4.12 million. While this number is staggering, Perseus also estimated that 66 percent of these were abandoned. A quarter of all these blogs were only used once. Just 2.6 percent of the blogs (around 100,000) were updated weekly. Of the active blogs, only 10% linked to a traditional news site. And who is the average blogger? Perseus found that more than half (52 percent) of bloggers were teenagers and 40 percent were people in their 20s.17 On the other hand, this is a broader definition of bloggers than some have in mind. In some cases yesterday's influential print columnists are today's bloggers. Journalists like Mickey Kaus (formerly of The New Republic), Howard Kurtz (of The Washington Post), Virginia Postrel (former editor of Reason) and Rich Lowry (editor of National Review), are people whose blogs are often cited by the old media and thus whose influence reaches much farther than their direct audience. The Web log culture is fascinating and still evolving. Whether it will become a serious online presence and influence on journalism remains unclear. Several panelists at the Online News Association's 2003 conference predicted that 2004 would be the year of blogging.18 At this point, though, the hard data suggest that its influence, like journals of opinion in print such as The Nation or The Weekly Standard, will be more intellectual than commercial. In 2003, many political analysts credited conservative blogs for playing a role in the resignation of Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott when the mainstream press did not do much with the story of his comments in favor of past segregation. Whether blogs come to define the Internet or represent only a small but appealing aspect of it, is still a question.

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