Initially, I came up with thousands of reasons as to why blogs and newspapers are completely different. I believe this was my instinct as a result of the ritual encompassed with reading a Newspaper, and the accessibility connoted with blogging and the Internet. Additionally, the blogs I am personally partial too are just a series of aesthetically pleasing photographs, with the occasional text. However, when I found myself literally pulling The New York Times.com beside Glenn Greenwald’s column in Salon.com on my computer screen, I realized, that the differences between these two news sources are few and far between. This revelation was further reinforced by the fact that Newspapers (which are now almost all online) are equipping themselves with highly popular news blogs. For example, The New York Times’ blog “The Lede” has a wide variety of posts and clearly embraces the coming of new media, placing a video clip in conjunction with almost all of their posts. In this post titled “Fidel Castro’s Doubts About Cuban Communism and Iranian Anti-Semitism” [1]the article opens with a clip from the popular Television show The Simpsons. Though I don’t believe that this was ineffective as it easily could have been, I have a hard time believing a comparable image would be placed next to this article in the Newspaper. The post (or article, are they interchangeable at this point?) ultimately redeems itself by placing a more “appropriate” clip of Julia Sweig, an expert on Cuba, later in the post. The Guardian has additionally set up a News Blog, which compared to The New York Times blog varies only marginally. Their post titled, “Mia Farrow’s blood diamond’ testimony at war crimes trial: as it happened” [2] is structurally quite different from most newspaper articles, taking us on an hourly journey of the court case and its relevant happenings. One of the most eligible differences, however, is the fact that readers are able to provide a commentary on the post, allowing these Official News Blogs to be a conversation amongst the public.
The public has always had to classify News sources, selecting which papers were most suited to them, as well as Television Networks. This process was made much simpler by the fact that Editors or Network Executives would curate the articles, stories and advertisements in order to appeal to a mass public. With the advancement of technology, specifically Blogging, the mass public has now become the curator, each source of news serving what it can, while the absorption of news remains in our hands. Each large newspaper creates a variety of sections to page through, still essentially managing what we read. On the other hand, independent blogs have the freedom to post events of their choosing. For example, the blog Futility Closet (http://www.futilitycloset.com/) is able to update with posts that serve as something most easily compared to elongated Snapple facts. The conversations stimulated by the commentary received on blogs, is touched upon in The Elements of Journalism: “This kind of high-tech interaction is a journalism that resembles conversation again, much like the original journalism that occurred in publick houses and coffeehouses four hundred years ago.” (p. 21) In fact, this conversation is not only limited to reader-to-reader, but from author-to-reader as well. For example, New York Magazine’s art critic Jerry Saltz responds to a criticism made about a factoid in his article[3]. Such interactions further reiterate Journalism’s regression (or progression?) as a conversation instead of a Gatekeeper.
With many Newspaper websites establishing “official” blogs, it becomes increasingly more difficult to try and define and compare Newspaper sourcing to that of blogging. As a reader, what I found to be the most substantial comparison is the variety of stories created by the blog, and the endless topics a blogger can write, or post about. While the “blogosphere” (as some call it) produces an array of endless information and opinion, Newspaper blogging is still slightly more rigid, as each post is presumably waiting for a seal of approval. These minor distinctions aside, as print is steadily on the decline, it may in fact be the public who decides what is blogging and what is News writing.
[1] http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/09/fidel-castros-doubts-about-cuban-communism-and-iranian-anti-semitism/#more-77055
[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2010/aug/09/mia-farrow-war-crimes-trial
[3] http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/07/jerry_saltzs_work_of_art_recap_2.html#comments
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