News in Blogs

In Journalism today we watched a video of a PBS special about Journalism, its problems and what the internet and technology are doing to Journalism. I have to agree with the commentators about what Journalism has become in that it is more focused on entertaining than informing in many instances. Shows like Hardball, Dateline, Primetime Live, etc. are a bunch of people yelling over each other, trying to cause controversy and gain ratings. But that's a different discussion for another day.

The interesting part for me was when they got to the part about technology and the internet, particularly blogging. Both sides of the argument were presented: those who believe blogs can present news and those who write the blogs are journalists with or without training and those who think news centered blogs present unoriginal and unreliable news. Jeff Jarvis, the creator of BuzzMachine which is a blog about "media and news" (taken from his About Me/Disclosures page). Jarvis also states on this page that "This is a personal site". He goes on to mention how he is connected and therefore possibly bias to various organizations and companies, which I appreciate. In the video we watched in class today he claims that anyone can perform and "Act of Journalism" if they have a computer and a cell phone; if someone is witnessing an act they can take a picture or video of it, post it on the internet and make it news.

I have to disagree with Jarvis and partially agree with the Dean of the School of Journalism at Columbia University, whose name I cannot confirm. The Dean (as I will refer to him) stated that he could not find blog news that was original. I took this to mean that the news in blogs is simply repeating or commenting on news that has already been printed or aired by known news organizations like ABC News or the New York Times. I don't read many blogs, especially news blogs so I cannot comment on that but I can say that I agree because of my own blogging.

Obviously I have a blog and am therefore by definition a blogger. But I blog about my personal life for my family and friends now that I am not living at home and able to share all of that information nor experiences with them. I do not attempt to report news, I may comment every now and then on what is going on in the world but I hope and pray that no takes me thoughts and ideas as fact.

Information on the internet is mostly unreliable. There are many things that I use and trust are true based on where the information is coming from but I do not know for fact that the information is true. For example, when writing a paper for one of my classes I will occasionally use Wikipedia to find dates or names or links but we are not even allowed to use Wikipedia as a cited source. Because anyone can edit and add information to the site, it is unreliable. That is that. Those who edit Wikipedia do not have someone editing their information, there are no fact checkers to make sure what they are saying is what actually happened. The same can be said for blogs.

There may come a day when Journalists will use blogs to report the news (some news stations are starting to) but as of right now, independent bloggers are not Journalists and cannot be completely relied on to provide pertinent, bias free and reliable news.

That's my opinion and its only an opinion.