Tuesday, 18 March 2008, 15:30
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Paul Bradshaw rounds up some key points raised at the JEECamp unconference that he helped organise last week.
Blogging vs journalism, yet again
Saturday, 3 February 2007, 14:39
A set of questions e-mailed to me by a journalism student have given me the opportunity to organise my thoughts on the relationship between “blogging” and “established media”.
Be warned — there are more than 1,200 words below the fold. But they can be summarised like this:
Media bloggers face questions like this every few months, and the problem is always the same. For some reason, many journalists and journalism students are still asking questions framed around the assumption that “bloggers” and “journalists” are mutually exclusive species. They also seem to assume that “journalists” are defined as people who work in “mainstream media”. Both of these assumptions are wrong.
Blogs are just a publishing technology, which can be used for distributing any type of content, including journalism. Some bloggers are journalists but most are not.
The real distinction is not based on the characteristics of the content published with these tools, but an economic distinction between an established business model based on mass-market publishing and a new type of micro-publishing that is based on inexpensive tools and low-cost infrastructure.
The real conflict is economic: specifically, the disruption to traditional publishing businesses caused by the drastic reduction in barriers to entry to publishing.
So here are my long, rambling answers to the student’s questions:
