Blogging Journalism
I recently read Owen Gibson's article regarding the impact that blogging is making in US politics and the media. In the article, he mentions that "[blogging] is classic investigative journalism" and that what makes blogging different from traditional journalism is that the clues are out there for the whole world to experience. A prime example of this is "Rathergate" in which bloggers from all sides of the political arena dissected CBS' story, evidence and resources and used their power to influence the news agenda. This type of in-depth investigation is available to everyone and the fact that bloggers dive into specific topics and stories and question their validity is awesome to experience. Although it's doubtful that blogging will take the place of print and TV journalism, I do think that blogging enables us the ability to question the norm and seek the truth.
1 Comments:
I think each side of this equation, traditional media outlets and bloggers, bring something of value to investigation journalism. Traditional outlets have the resources: they can pay people to specialize in a specific topic, spend their working hours investigating it, and back them up with the resources of an entire news organization.
At the same time, the blogosphere thinks better outside of the box and has no shortage of passion for particular issues, a wide range of specialists due to it's limitless size, and an ability to aggregate among different investigators that the more proprietary mainstream media shuns.
Ultimately, it seems that some investigative issues lend themselves better to traditional investigative journalism (today's front page story in the Washington Post on building the Iraqi army) and some to bloggers (the National Guard documents story) where thinking outside of the box and investigating a story from all angles is more critical.
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