The online environment is growing rapidly. A report released in August 2007 by blogging database giants Technorati revealed that 80,000 new blogs are created every day, doubling the total blogosphere every five months and sparking nearly a million new posts daily. The growth of the blog is largely down to the ease in which someone can publish on the net with services such as blogger, Word Press and MSN spaces all enabling the simple set-up of a web log. But the blogging environment is not without its flaws. According to journalist Nick Davies in ‘Flat Earth News: An award-winning reporter exposes falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the global media' the ascendancy of citizen journalism has “sparked a media revolution of junk journalism”. The sheer weight of numbers has resulted in thousands of anonymous pamphleteers shouting their prejudices past one another and basking in the glory of self-publishing. However, it cannot be denied that blogs are now an integral part of the way in which the public consume news. So how valid are blogs as reliable sources of information, and equally - are bloggers destroying the principles of conventional journalism?
The former Financial Times reporter Tom Feremski described blogging as ‘a communications mechanism handed to us by the long tail of the internet.’ One difference between blogs and newspaper articles is the way in which a blog communicates to the reader. Blogs are fast and adaptable; they can combine text and audio, still images and streamed video. Howard Kurtz, professional blogger for the Washington Post commented upon the personal nature of a web log saying, “bloggers have a voice and emotions and they’re speaking directly to you. They’re up front about their biases. In comparison newspaper stories seem like straitjackets, incremental and dulled down”. Additionally, blogging has enormous potential in enabling on-the-ground reporting when news suddenly breaks in remote locations. An example of this is the multitude of online war diaries kept by soldiers based in Iraq and Afghanistan. Just be careful not to face the same fate as the American soldier who was demoted and faced legal action after revealing classified military information on his public blog while in Baghdad.
Because blogging is so cheap (and in most cases totally free) it’s accessible to everybody, regardless of financial status or background. The impact of so many different bloggers available is the rich variety of opinions and preferences this creates for a reader. Kate Maltby, a Yale student who writes for the Huffington Post said, “A blog is a news digest, filtered according to personal taste, and to get the exact collection of news summaries that are relevant to my lifestyle, I can go to a blog run by a person with similar interests.” The advantages of blogging is that is caters for personal expression, it can be constantly updated and have a clearly distinct theme; the choices available are practically endless. In contrast, mere paper and ink struggles to contend.
Blogs have corporate benefits as well. In 2004, former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates praised web logs during his keynote speech at the company’s annual summit in Seattle. In a speech to an audience of chief executives and shareholders, Gates said “regularly updated online journals could be good ways for firms to tell customers, staff and partners what they are doing”. He suggested blogs – particularly internal knowledge management journals, have advantages over older ways of communicating such as websites and e-mail. Today more than seven thousand Microsoft employees are using blogs to keep people up to date with their projects, and they certainly aren’t the only firm to do so. Other notable examples include IBM and Google.
Conversely, former Channel 4 News editor Charlie Beckett suggests that business web logging will not be widely adopted as Gates initially suggested. In ‘Super media: Saving journalism so it can save the World’ Beckett underlines the legal and regulatory concerns of corporate blogs. For starters any expressed opinion is likely to be reviewed and filtered by the company press office, as well as the small matter of potential libel issues and (for publicly listed companies) stock market disclosure rules. He said, “The notion that more than a few companies might relax their external relations strategies enough to allow web log communication, willy-nilly, between staff members and the outside world, is absurd, no matter how many consultants insist such communication might actually have a beneficial effect on a company's image.” The earliest advocates of the blogging world operate on the principle that information is free – a concept that is likely to make businesses and capitalists recoil in horror.
There are many examples of blogs which present a fair and valid reflection of the news. Unfortunately, there are thousands more that don’t. The main problem with blogging is that it focuses upon news-analysis over news-gathering. Oxford University professor Jonathan Zittrain argues in ‘The future of the internet: and how to stop it’ that blogging is dominated by opinion writing, a “tiny and inconsequential corner of the journalism world”. Zittrain cites the coverage of news in Iraq by the New York Times as an example of this, saying “Show me a New York Times story on the war in Iraq and I’ll show you twenty bloggers who think the real story is how the Times fails in its coverage of the Iraq war. It’s undeniable that web logs elevate analysis over hard news, and value speed over judiciousness - but is this necessarily a bad thing? According to the author Daniel B. Beaulieu, the nature in which blogs are written and the unique skill set they demand have “moulded bloggers into multi-skilled and capable journalists”.
There is a contrasting view. The Guardian’s Neil McIntosh suggests too much interactivity and commentating have created a seldom-restrained, scrappy world of web journalism. In his Guardian column (March 2007) McIntosh said “being a good writer helps a blogger about as much as a good singing voice helps a broadcast anchor”. The internet facilitates the good, the bad, and the ugly of the blogging world, and all for free. While citizen journalism reaches all corners of the online community, it often comes at the expense of traditional journalism ethics. In the same fashion that television killed radio, conventional reporting meets a similar fate at the hands of contemporary media.
The Guardian assistant editor David Leigh argued that blogging has sparked a culture of ‘junk journalism’. He said, “You can get junk food on every high street. And you can get junk journalism almost as easily. But just as there is now a Slow Food movement, I should also like to see more Slow Journalism. Slow Journalism would show greater respect for the reporter as a patient assembler of facts.” It seems that ‘slow journalism’ is being phased out as consumers of news demand the instant gratification of information over the more traditional format of paper-based news. This creates a concern that has been fiercely debated in media circles in recent years – Has blogging destroyed traditional journalism and is the newspaper industry next?
The newspaper industry is in decline and has been for some time. A National Readership Survey (NRS) report in May 2008 revealed sales were diminishing year-by-year by 4.7% in the United Kingdom. Ironically enough at the same time the consumption of news can claim to have vastly increased. This has a direct impact upon employees and trained journalists many of whom are finding themselves without a job. An article in The Telegraph published in November 2008 reported that Rupert Murdoch had announced further job cuts at his British newspaper assets. Murdoch attributed the decision to “an advertising downturn and company restructuring”, adding that the current media environment was “extremely challenging to the newspaper sector”.
A trend among newspapers is to hire out their tasks to freelancers or training staff members to be multi-skilled across the board in web design, pod casting, and even video editing. Subsequently it is rare to find a journalist skilled specifically in one particular area and thus the era of conventional reporting is gradually coming to an end. In his book ‘Can you trust the media?’ Journalism professor at City University Adrian Monck suggests that “the informed citizen has now replaced the honest working professional”. One problem is blogs feed on newspapers for its information, while destroying its business model at the same time. And while the blogosphere initially began in the perspective element of journalism, widely relying upon conventional reporting for news, today some blogs compete remarkably well in the news sector. Mainstream blogs such as
http://www.techcrunch.com/ deliver technology news as quickly as large media companies. Worryingly for the professionals, the millions of amateur bloggers are getting better than the elites in many areas. Blogging is dynamic and constantly expanding. The newspaper industry, on the other hand, is stood still.
Traditional journalism is made even more difficult by the financial constraints faced by newspaper companies. As well as being inefficient and shallow compared with the depth of the internet, newspapers are extremely expensive to produce and distribute in a marketplace where the serious competition is essentially free. Thus newspapers find themselves relying more and more heavily upon advertising and giving away free gifts to boost revenue. This tarnishes the integrity of journalism as the press may be restricted in publishing for fear of offending an advertiser, or placing a heavy impetus upon sales and sensationalism – something that goes against the traditional ethics of news writing. Many pundits criticise the newspaper industry for not evolving or keeping pace with the market environment. American blogger Robert Scoble declares, "Newspapers are dead. The industry has not invested in its future. It is suffering the repercussions of that. How many future journalists are being trained for the online world? I can tell you how many: zero."
So can blogs be regarded as a reliable source of journalistic information? It’s difficult to give a comprehensive answer – due to the sheer scope of web logs available on the net. The majority of blogs do not provide reliable news content, merely because the majority of blogs are opinion-based, usually offering a different slant or analysis upon the news story. In ‘The Cult of the Amateur: How blogs, My Space, You Tube and the rest of today's user-generated media are killing our culture and economy’ Andrew Keen urges the reader to consider the consequences of “blindly supporting a culture that endorses plagiarism and fundamentally weakens traditional media institutions.” Keen says, “When anonymous bloggers, unconstrained by professional standards can manipulate public opinion, Our ‘cut-and-paste’ online culture - in which intellectual property is freely swapped, remashed, and aggregated - threatens over 200 years of intellectual property rights robbing authors and journalists of their creative labours.”
Do bloggers have a right to consider themselves journalists? Not in the conventional sense of the word, no. But valued cultural institutions such as professional newspapers and magazines are succumbing to the avalanche of unskilled, user generated free content. In today’s self-broadcasting culture amateurism is celebrated and anybody with an opinion, irrespective of knowledge or expertise can publish a blog. Thus the distinction between trained reporters and the uninformed amateur is becoming an increasingly grey area. The anonymity offered by the internet calls into question the reliability of the information we receive. After all, we wouldn’t use a book as a resource if it didn’t have an author. At the UNESCO World Press Freedom day debate former editor of The Independent Kim Fletcher said, “It’s difficult to trust a culture that settles in an environment in which sexual predators and identity thieves can roam free.” However, if the blogging culture continues to grow, and in turn traditional journalism fails to stop the rot, bloggers could be the only journalists - and the only source of news, we have left.
Nov 24 2006: It was billed as the clash of the season. A West Country derby and a battle for top spot in the Guinness Premiership rolled into one. Bristol’s Memorial Stadium is packed to the rafters, and despite the driving sheets of rain and merciless cold, the old ground is rocking with anticipation. Gloucester, without a defeat to their name all season, look to have taken the spoils with Willie Walker’s seventy-fifth minute penalty. Alas, the Cherry and Whites underestimated the grit and determination of Bristol’s old guard. The pack rumble up the field once more, creaking legs an’ all – it’s ugly but familiar stuff from the boys in blue. Seventeen nail-bitingly tense phases later and the ball is set up for a Jason Strange attempt at the posts. Twelve thousand people hold their breath, but they needn’t have. The Welshman executes with aplomb, as if last-gasp drop goals were easy pickings. The Bristol players and fans celebrate with gusto, top spot and the local bragging rights are secured.
