Print Vs Blog Media

As an inexperience journalist and reader I was excited to pick apart and find the differences between blogs and print media. After about two weeks of steady reading all I have truly found is what I think can be called a “should be difference” between the two. From the little I know about the world of media I understand that newspapers have been regarded for the majority of their existence as authoritative sources of information. While they have been known to have underlying agendas, which essentially determine what they choose to print, the style in which a good news article is written has been considered as close to objective as is possible. With this in mind, I tried to find the key differences between the world of blogs and that of print media with little success. In general I think that the nature of information transfer has changed drastically over that past two decades creating what I think is aptly described as a “toss up” over what qualifies as an information source in the modern age.

At first, my instinct was to say that a blog by nature understands that it is catering to a very specific audience and thus makes no presupposition to being objective. As I understand it, blogs where invented out of people who had opinions they wanted to share with the world. Thus it is no surprise that a phrase like “My special interest is in…” should appear in Ben Goldacre’s article about the Pope on the Blog “Bad Science”. Furthermore, I felt that the fact that most blogs are very topically specific was evidence for their explicit partiality to a particular audience. In contrast to this idea about blogs, I was under the impression that newspapers such as the NY times, which I believed took themselves to be objective perspectives on the news, were in fact far from that. In reading several articles in the NY times and the Guardian I found that only some of the articles could come close to objective reporting. Other articles such as one titled “Barack Obama: 'no' to solar panels on the White House roof” in the Guardian is in my opinion immediately and clearly leaning towards a certain idea of what the facts mean. Even articles in the NY times that are very stylistically objective only have so much room to write and therefore must make choices about which information to put out. Thus I have discovered that print media is not necessarily marked by the objective standpoint it pretends to take. In this sense, print media although it may try to cater to a greater audience by seeming more objectively situated, is still caught catering to a particular clientele.

Furthermore, there are now fully developed news blogs such as the Huffington Post, which seems to act just like any major newspaper. Aside from actually being in print, the Huffington Post is stylistically very similar to other print media. Still there is something to be said about actually being in print, namely that news that is in print has a particular idea of legitimacy associated with it. Professionalism is what seemed to be lacking in most blogs at the beginning. Somehow, I think that this is traced from the idea that print media costs money and thus everything in print is funded and thus legitimate. Writing that last sentence even I am skeptical of the connection but I think it can be better said in the following way: When blogs came about they did not need to sell so they did not need to have relevant and more importantly reliable information. The dependence on reliability is what makes people think that print media is somehow more legitimate. Thus the physicality of a print media for a long time was its claim to authenticity.

Effectively my search for a true difference has been mostly fruitless. In today’s world I feel that blogs and print media have come to a common ground in which neither has any ostensible claim to objectivity. The physicality of print media I believe once helped support the notion of its professionalism, but with the rise of blogs like Huffington post and politicalfactcheck.com such claims to professionalism are lost. As I stated above the difference between the two is only a “should be” in the sense that print media might still want to hold onto the idea of itself as an objective look at the news. It seems however that now more than ever it’s impossible for print media to claim superiority over blogs.