Popping my blogging cherry...

I have never written a blog before. To be honest, I don't think I've ever sat down and read someone else's blog either. To me, it seems like another facet of social networking - an excuse for online narcissism in the written form. Who would have thought blogging could be considered journalism? I definitely didn't.

"They are opinionated ranting, often incoherent and frequently biased with little regard for accuracy or balance. They are also compellingly addictive and threatening to emerge as a new brand of journalism." - Journalism.co.uk 

 "But what about people blogging in from overseas? People in war-torn countries reporting on their perspective... I'm sure it is vastly different to that of a paid journalist, that is, providing the journalist is even amidst the action." How poignant? A  fellow student in my International Media Studies tutorial pointed this out to me. It begs the question; How powerful blogs are as an emerging form of journalism?

The following website has some fantastic information about how to successfully blog as a journalist.

http://www.arabmediasociety.com/UserFiles/Ten%20steps%20to%20citizen%20journalism%20online.pdf

Journalist Nick Davies has this to say about citizen journalism...

 "What you haven't got is citizen journalists covering the courts, or the government departments, or the police, or the hospitals, or the schools, or doing investigations. There's a massive swathe of news where citizen journalists can't do the job because they don't have the skills or the time or the resources."

Blogging and citizen journalism, while beneficial to the overall news cycle, should not be the primary form of independent journalism.