Weblog Journalism: Between Infiltration and Integration
blog.lib.umn.edu
by Jason Gallo, Northwestern University
quotes:
Weblogs have begun to augment traditional journalistic practices, providing the seeds for an incremental, rather than radical, change in how the media reports and disseminates news. News-oriented blogs have created a real-time virtual feedback loop that disrupts the temporality of the traditional news cycle. Furthermore, they are helping to usher in a new form of hybrid journalism that merges traditional newsroom practices with the decentralized intelligence of individuals and groups spread across the Internet.
While it is undeniable that new communication technologies have had profound and often disruptive effects upon entrenched journalistic practices, they have primarily enhanced the speed, accuracy, and geographic scope of reporting, or they have augmented the dissemination and reception of news and opinion.
Any medium that possibly enhances access to the wider public carries with it democratic potential.
Blogs allow each user to acts as a manipulator of information, enabling the user to construct an individual interpretation of information, and channel that interpretation back into the discursive space of cyberspace, where it can circulate indefinitely without further maintenance from its creator.
Statistics complied by David Wehlan for the Jul./Aug. 2003 edition of American Demographics indicate that only 17 percent of U.S. adults are aware of blogs, 5 percent have created or read a Weblog, and only 1 percent describe themselves as dedicated blog readers. These statistics indicate that any effect that Weblogs have at the moment are the product of the true early adopters (see Rogers 1995), rather than of a broad democratic movement.
The potential of the Weblog is situated in its very construction as an interactive medium, and the intertextuality of the discourse that it supports. The fact that Weblogs are maintained by individuals that can exist outside of the hierarchical structures of traditional media organizations allows, at the very least, the potential for a diversification of the voices engaged in public discourse. Weblogs can serve to fill the gaps in public discourse that are not addressed or are underrepresented by traditional journalism.
Convergence could set up a scenario in which cross-postings to a media-run Weblog could compel the Weblog to engage in a debate about the merits of texts generated elsewhere inside the same media organization. By being forced to confront the work of a colleague, the Weblog author would run the risk of running afoul of the same editorial board that monitors his/her work or, perhaps, would feel undue pressure to defend the text out of professional loyalty. In effect, an increased coupling of Weblogs with media organizations could potentially undermine the objectivity and autonomy of the Weblog author.
The dangers of convergence are exemplified by the case of Steve Olafson, a seven-year Houston Chronicle veteran, fired from his position because his editors felt that his personal Weblog, run under a pseudonym, compromised his ability to do his job as a reporter by poking fun of some of the politicians that he covered (see Olafson, 2003). Additionally, the example of two U.S. journalists, CNN correspondent Kevin Sites and Time freelancer Joshua Kucera, reporting from Iraq during the Second Gulf War being pressured by their parent organizations to shut down their weblogs underscores the tensions that exist between intuitional journalism and independent blogging (Cyberjournalism.net 03/22 and 04/17/2003). On his Weblog The Other Side Kucera writes, “My editors have demanded that I stop posting to this site until the war ends. And they pay the bills, so what can I do?”
The current state of Weblog journalism is paradoxical at best, a relationship eloquently summarized in an Information Advisor report titled “Are Weblogs a Legitimate Business Research Source?” It states: "The rapidity in which a new story or report can be transmitted also increases the chances that misinterpretations, errors, and outright hoaxes can be spread. One check on this problem of misinformation is that there is also an equally quick self-correcting mechanism on the Internet, whereby those who detect the error send out a correction or raise a red flag just as quickly." |
