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 Presentation slides: Weblogging: is it journalism? (PDF 2.8MB)

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Emilis Dambauskas, emilis.d@gmail.com
postgraduate student, Public Communications studies, Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas

This presentation looks at weblogging (blogging): what it is, its history and current trends, types of blogs. Traits that characterize blogging are discussed. Some of them include instantaneity, interactivity, unmediated expression of personal opinion and point of view. The question if blogging is journalism and how is it going to change mass media and journalism is asked.

I use the definition of journalism taken from The New Encyclopædia Britannica: the collection, preparation and distribution of news and related commentary and feature materials through such media as pamphlets, newsletters, newspapers, magazines, radio, motion pictures, television and books.

In my presentation I use a modified definition of blogging, taken from Wikipedia: a personal website that tracks headlines and articles from other websites. They are typically devoted to a specific audience or topic.

The beginings of Weblogging can be tracked to the first website (W3 news by Tim Berners-Lee) on the web in 1992 though the real adventure of blogging as we see it today started with the explosion of the web in about 1996–1997. Further on it became available to the wider public with (mostly) free tools for webloggers, such as Movable Type, Bloghorn, Radio Userland and (mostly) free websites, such as Blogger, LiveJournal, etc..

Currently it is unclear of the exact number of weblogs online. The statistics and estimations range from 4 to 10 million blogs worldwide, but about 66% of the sites are abandoned, so this leaves us with 2–3 million active blogs. However U.S. stats show that only 2% of online households read blogs at least once a week, 79% of surveyed people don’t know what a weblog is and only 4% of online users relied on blogs for news on Iraqi war, a major news event (Forrester research).

All these blogs can roughly be divided into two groups: personal weblogs (diaries and journals) and information weblogs (political, knoweledge, watchblogs, etc.). Blogs can also be categorized by the technology: weblogs, moblogs (mobile blogs), audioblogs, videoblogs, etc..

I don’t have stats on Lithuanian weblogs but a quick glance at the most connected ones shows that they are mainly personal diaries and news blogs.

It is interesting to note blog use in such contexts as the 2004 U.S. presidential elections campaigns: some candidates (especially Howard Dean) used blogging to rally their supporters and raise funds. Blogs can also become important phenomenon in societies where goverment censors media and there is no freedom of speech — like in Iran, where weblogs are used to spread news, that are censored by the goverment.

Blogs in general can be characterized by such traits:

• more instantaneity than other web publications
  
• high interactivity: usually blog readers can comment directly on the website, or they comment on other blogger posts in their own blogs
  
• costless: you don’t have to invest money, or be a technie to have a weblog
  
  
• blogs are personal, they help establish a personal contact (?) with the person
  
• bloggers usualy do not seek for objectivity, they express their own opinion. Glenn Reynolds (InstaPundit.com — one of the most popular weblogs) once stated: “I think you have a responsibility to opine honestly…”
  
• unmediated: blogs are not edited and published directly from the author to readers
  
• blogs raise issues and opinions that are forgotten or misrepresented in mass media
  

There are some important questions that arise:

• are blogs journalism? can they be called “amateur journalism”?
  
• can blogs be trusted? is information found in blogs credible? what about the ethics of bloggers?
  
• Dan Gilmor (Mercury News Technology Columnist at siliconvalley.com) stated: “journalism changes from lecture to conversation/seminar”. Is that really so? How weblogs are changing the big media?