Anyone can start a blog nowadays or publish an article on Wikipedia or enter a definition on Urban Dictionary. And this is exactly why I’m a huge fan of the blogosphere.
What started out as a love-hate relationship has now transformed into my admiration and respect for a new generation of bloggers. Recent advances in cyberspace establish that blogs provide a quality level of contemporary and legitimate journalism ““ typos and emoticons aside.
Earlier this month, journalism Professor Michael Skube at Elon University, North Carolina, declared the blogosphere as “a potpourri of opinion and little more,” to the Los Angeles Times.
“Skepticism, restraint, a willingness to suspect judgment and to put oneself in the background ““ these would not seem to be a blogger’s trademarks,” he wrote.
Skube is under the impression that religious zealots and neo-anarchists dominate the blog world, boasting their declarations of indiscretion. But Skube needs to wake up and smell the Google.
In recent years, the Internet has proved a vital source for up-to-the-minute news and an overflowing variety of opinions. Sure, some Web sites may represent our nation’s vapid and vain, but if Skube did the same research that he criticized bloggers for lacking, he’d find the value of online journalism.
In 2004, Chris Allbritton, in his blog “Back to Iraq: Dispatches from the New Middle East,” recounted firsthand experience of the turmoil surrounding the Imam Ali Shrine in Najaf, Iraq. Najaf police kidnapped Allbritton, who traveled with a team of New York Times and CNN reporters to interview Mahdi soldiers. Allbritton lived to tell the tale, narrating it on his Web site.
Although Allbritton’s posts may not have the same streamlined editing and structured layout that one may find in a newspaper, that doesn’t discount his writing as “armchair commentary.” In fact, Allbritton’s blog allows a much more authentic and personalized experience, while also allowing his readers to directly comment and provide their support.
Now, it’s clear to see where Skube’s denunciations of cyberspace journalism stem from. As a journalism professor, Skube may be part of the pack that foretells the doomful “death of print journalism.” These modern-day soothsayers see the same threat in Internet publishing as record companies saw in the MP3.
To them, the blogosphere is the deadly iPod to the print journalism equivalent of mom-and-pop’s record store (or the Tower Records-esque mega-newspaper).
But, just as Americans made the smooth transition from VHS to DVD, perhaps it’s simply time for a change. And change doesn’t necessarily have to come along with any newspaper’s demise.
In the aftermath of April’s Virginia Tech tragedy, The Washington Post ““ indeed, a nationally read newspaper ““ created the “Virginia Tech Shootings Blog Roundup,” a forum for bloggers to post articles relating to the violent event and to discuss controversial topics such as gun control.
Quite a handful of the participants on the Washington Post Web site were not traditional reporters. In fact, many of the entries were taken from personal blog sites, such as LiveJournal, in which Virginia Tech students expressed haunting reflections and brutal observations immediately following the shootings.
Of course, sites like the “Virginia Tech Shootings Blog Roundup” and Allbritton’s blog include a level of emotion and drama that is usually restrained and edited out of ““ what Skube would consider ““ “old-fashioned gumshoe reporting.”
But that certainly does not justify depreciating the bloggers as illegitimate journalists and belittling their opinions as sloppy or unreasoned.
After all, what separates these bloggers from conventional reporters is an element of reality that can never be fully recounted or reproduced. They weren’t out there to just gather the facts and to tell a story ““ they actually lived through these experiences. You can’t get more straightforward coverage than that.
Perhaps Skube’s encounter with blogging was a shallow and noisy introduction to the virtual debris that can clutter the Internet. Had he given further investigation to the blogosphere, Skube might have been surprised to find the amount of credible journalism available on the World Wide Web.
And that extra research, really, would only have required a little time utilizing Google on his Web browser. Good old-fashioned gumshoe reporting, indeed.
Link your blog to Chung at lchung@media.ucla.edu. General comments can be sent to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.