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Re: Friday, April 29, 2005
Hi, I wrote that article :-) Let me translate the title for you: "Weblogs vs. journalism, and why we need a new word". Basically it builds upon what you said about watching which words to use when talking about weblogs and what was said by others in the debate between journalism vs. blogging and also the fact that most bloggers just don't do anything remotely related to journalism (catblogging, linkdumping...). I always used to say "Journalism is a method, blogs are a tool", and when I wrote that in the backchannel chat at Les Blogs somebody replied: "Blogging is a method too". Keeping in mind that most bloggers probably don't do what this person meant when he talked about 'blogging', my article asks the question if we don't need a new word for this phenomenon. What do you call the phenomenon whereby a group of people who are loosely connected by weblogs go after a newsworthy event and try to tell a story by posting facts and comments they discovered through various means and count on the comments to refine and correct the information they publish? Is that citizen-journalism? Not really a good term, because the method used is not journalism. Is it blogging? No, because blogging can also be about cats etc. and have nothing to do with newsgathering. News-swarming then? Too cumbersome. Piranha-style-newsgathering? Even worse. So there you have it, the gist of my article. Comments welcome!
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