Blogs are definitly gaining popularity. When I opened my latest issue of Time Magazine and saw an article called "Blogs Have Their Day" I was a little surprised. Time Magazine doing blogs?
I read on, enjoying the fact that I, unlike many readers, actually know and use a blog. Before taking a class dealing with blogging, I would have just looked at the pictures, read the caption, and skipped over the actual article. Yet now, I'm an informed reader!
The article deals with the blog PowerLine and its impact on the "60 Minutes" scandal. Before they get all political though, the article talks about the wonders of the blog. Blogs are called "news Jetsons-style" for their ease of use and short amount of time needed to read one.
The end of the article reminded me of some of the articles I had read earlier about blogs being a new form of journalism. While Time doesn't doubt the blog's impact, it doesn't think that they can change the world. "Blogs are just too different, too weird, to become wholly mainstream. For starters, they're too cheap, too easy and too loud" states the article. Ah, another blogging conflict.
In the article there was also a text box called "10 Things We Learned About Blogs". I felt so smart reading it! It mentioned fake blogs, women bloggers and the fact that anyone can blog. Finally, what we've known for ages now is just making it into the "big" magazines.
Posted by VanessaKolberg at December 22, 2004 10:58 PMGreat post, Vanessa. Blogging is a form of writing. Just as all writing does not have to be journalism in order to be useful or good (or effective), blogs don't have to be judged by the standards of journalisms. The professionals working for mainstream media (like Time or CBS) are part of a different world. No individual blog is likely to reach the audience of a mainstream publication (or even a small-town newspaper), but it's the fact that almost anyone can blog that is affecting the way those sometime-bloggers react to the news that is packaged for them. There's another avenue out there for education and opinion-sharing and activism. Just as you, Vanessa, didn't need Time to inform you about the blogging phenomenon, there are going to be a lot of people who no longer depend on the professional media to help them understand the world. This can be good and bad, but either way, it's more and more commonplace.
Posted by: Dennis G. Jerz at December 23, 2004 05:55 PM