Blog with me

My first memory of the Internet was when I was in second grade and my father signed up for America Online. Our computer was a Macintosh Classic and it had a black-and-white screen. The modem was 2400 bps and we were amazed.
Since then the World Wide Web has grown by leaps and bounds. The screens are colorful, the speeds are faster and the information is infinite.
When Internet journals first came onto the scene, I did not think there was much to them. It was just everyday people droning on about their lives and opinions. I had no idea that the now termed “blogs” would become the ground-shaking newsmakers they are today.
Media critic and faculty member at New York University Jay Rosen came up with “10 things radical about the weblog form in journalism.”
He claims that weblogs are a very democratic way for people to get their news and daily information compared to the radio, television and newspaper which seem to be inching in the direction of obsolete systems like the newswire and the record player.
Rosen says blogs are radical because today’s journalism comes out of a market economy where blogs are free.
This is true. You are reading this blog free of charge thanks to the advertising revenues of blogger.com. And it's not like the traditional media world is “pop-up” free.
Advertisements take up full pages in newspapers and magazines, commercials squeeze their way into news programs every seven minutes on television and the radio. Not only that but you are sending in your cable bill and sticking your 50 cents into the newspaper machine to get your news.
Blogging is free. It is free for the reader; it can be free for the writer and without serious money at stake the floodgates open for anything at all to be available for millions of people.
Rosen’s second radical blog truth is the fact that in everyday journalism, professionals run the show and amateurs are asked to call or write in. In the “blogosphere,” it is the amateurs who are running the show and it is the professionals who are welcomed into their worlds.
This is where blogging becomes problematic. Do we want everyone and their uncle twice-removed to be stuffing the Internet with opinions and stories? Do we want amateur news to be feeding professional news?
A lot of these people are blogging news and information for the fun of it. Don’t we need that market, objectivity and professionalism that we expect from our news-gatherers? There needs to be a line.
I do not want to read about a congressional hearing or election coverage from a writer who just happened to be bored that day.
Rosen says that when it comes to blogs, everyone is a reader and everyone is a writer. Blogs give the ability for readers to post comments to individual posts on any blog and since there are no time or space constraints, these readers/writers can go all out. (If you visit Ascent of Humanity, a blog by a professor at Penn State University, you can see how
readers chime in with comments for each post.)
This feature of blogs has its ups and downs. Along with the blogger, this allows the reader to add anything. Whether it is bias, false or unfair it can be instantly posted on a site for millions to see.
Imagine if newspapers printed every letter to the editor they received or if news stations played every call they got on the air. I would hope that most people do not want to hear or read those things. They trust their professional news-handlers to sort out the newsworthy opinions.
Rosen's sixth observation says that weblogs can work journalistically and they do not need a huge amount of readers to be successful, like a newspaper does.
It is not a good thing to think that blogs can be the answer to real news or can be. We as the public should be able to rely on the news professionals to collect and distribute our news.
It is good that big names in journalism have a medium like a weblog to let people know a little more information. In certain cases the blog may uncover their bias and once a journalist loses his/her objective credibility, it can be hard for the public as a whole to trust everything he/she say. Journalists need to stay objective on all subjects that they cover.
Some may say that they do not trust the media, and blogs are the only way to go. If that is the case then our media needs some serious help. The day the weblog becomes the primary news medium for people is the day Media Ethics classes in colleges become optional one credit courses.
There are many radical differences and benefits of the blog. However, the more people rely on amateur news gathering, the less people will care and be fully informed about everything around them, whether it is politics, science or education. Blogs are a nice addition to traditional media, but they are not radical enough to replace any of it.