Bloggers, Journalists. “Yes I do?”
Bloggers. Journalists. Mainstream media.
Historically, news has been exclusive to both print and the broadcast media. Yet we all know that internet changed the rules. Exclusivity doesn’t belong to journalism no more. Don’t you feel and see and touch the air of this seemingly big demarcation line between bloggers and journalists? Of course, pretty understandable for media to have some sort of Berlin wall for the moment, considering that bloggers are still redefining themselves, whereas the media have already earned their spot gaining certain respect for being neutral, objective and fearless.
Bloggers?
“This emerging habit of tweet and hide, or hit and delete (without clear disclosure in the blog post itself), erodes blogging credibility.”
We’re not there yet.
“Writers – bloggers included – most especially those who count as shapers of opinion, should be held to higher standards.”
And as time goes, standards kept changing. Don’t blink; you got to keep up with the pace because it could be more like “whose standards?”
Yet, I know for one that there was some sort paradigm shift (shit! I hate that phrase!) that happened. Media are now reading blogs and in so many instances already, using blogs to report news. Quite an easy observation, isn’t it? Whereas bloggers still rely on the media for the most part.
Clear waters for blogging? Or a big collider?
But the big question to me is – where is journalism headed?
Will there be a peacemaker at the convergence zone? Or marriage?
“Yes, I do?”
Contributing Writer: Reyna Elena
www.reynaelena.com
Popularity: 1% [?]
“This emerging habit of tweet and hide, or hit and delete (without clear disclosure in the blog post itself), erodes blogging credibility.”
That’s sounds like a story I read comparing eating beef and buffalo. If you get a bad piece of beef, you say, ‘I got a bad cut of beef.’ If you get a bad piece of buffalo, you say, ‘I dont like buffalo.’ It’s the newness, the exoticism of blogging. We dont think mainstream media has lost its credibility because showbiz writers work for it.
Never mind mainstream media, let it be a world upon itself. The blogosphere in what we have universal fondness of so-called blogging, ought to pervade cyberspace and to some extent even have to prevail over mainstream media.
Print media will soon be a thing of the past after years they made or rake a lot of money. It cannot fill the time gaps when news or information must race to every conceivable reading screen as only the net can provide after a few punches in the keys.
I don’t like mainstream media, everything is too late if we have to as much as to depend on what stories they will publish. Besides, it is unfree as editors, publishers, media owners are kings upon the writers, columnists, reporters under them.
And the pretentions are already sickening as though they can set the journalistic standards.
Side-topic:
BIR/Philippines affirm that importation of books is exempt from value-added tax (VAT).
RN CC2008-0066051
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Perhaps some of you must have read this. I just thought of sharing this a beautiful source on the “Berlin wall” between blogging and journalism written by Atlantic Senior Editor Andrew Sullivan. The full article is at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200811/andrew-sullivan-why-i-blog. It’s a lengthy piece so here are some quotable sections:
“A reporter can wait—must wait—until every source has confirmed. A novelist can spend months or years before committing words to the world. For bloggers, the deadline is always now. Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.”
“Like any new form, blogging did not start from nothing. It evolved from various journalistic traditions.”
“The blog remained a superficial medium, of course. By superficial, I mean simply that blogging rewards brevity and immediacy.”
“the key to understanding a blog is to realize that it’s a broadcast, not a publication. If it stops moving, it dies. If it stops paddling, it sinks.”
“But the superficiality masked considerable depth—greater depth, from one perspective, than the traditional media could offer. The reason was a single technological innovation: the hyperlink.”
“A blog, therefore, bobs on the surface of the ocean but has its anchorage in waters deeper than those print media is technologically able to exploit. It disempowers the writer to that extent, of course. The blogger can get away with less and afford fewer pretensions of authority. He is—more than any writer of the past—a node among other nodes, connected but unfinished without the links and the comments and the track-backs that make the blogosphere, at its best, a conversation, rather than a production.”
“…blogging suffers from the same flaws as postmodernism: a failure to provide stable truth or a permanent perspective. A traditional writer is valued by readers precisely because they trust him to have thought long and hard about a subject, given it time to evolve in his head, and composed a piece of writing that is worth their time to read at length and to ponder. Bloggers don’t do this and cannot do this—and that limits them far more than it does traditional long-form writing.”
“A blogger will air a variety of thoughts or facts on any subject in no particular order other than that dictated by the passing of time. A writer will instead use time, synthesizing these thoughts, ordering them, weighing which points count more than others, seeing how his views evolved in the writing process itself, and responding to an editor’s perusal of a draft or two. The result is almost always more measured, more satisfying, and more enduring than a blizzard of posts. The triumphalist notion that blogging should somehow replace traditional writing is as foolish as it is pernicious.”
“To use an obvious analogy, jazz entered our civilization much later than composed, formal music. But it hasn’t replaced it; and no jazz musician would ever claim that it could. Jazz merely demands a different way of playing and listening, just as blogging requires a different mode of writing and reading.”
thanks for posting the link to Sully’s essay, Dfish. For me the money quote was right at the top:
blockquote>Sullivan: “For centuries, writers have experimented with forms that evoke the imperfection of thought, the inconstancy of human affairs, and the chastening passage of time. But as blogging evolves as a literary form, it is generating a new and quintessentially postmodern idiom that’s enabling writers to express themselves in ways that have never been seen or understood before. Its truths are provisional, and its ethos collective and messy. Yet the interaction it enables between writer and reader is unprecedented, visceral, and sometimes brutal. And make no mistake: it heralds a golden era for journalism.”
“To use an obvious analogy, jazz entered our civilization much later than composed, formal music. But it hasn’t replaced it; and no jazz musician would ever claim that it could. Jazz merely demands a different way of playing and listening, just as blogging requires a different mode of writing and reading.”
I think the trouble with blogging or bloggers compared with the mainstream media is the QUALITY of whatever one gets from the two forms of mass communication.
I think bloggers have a long way to go before they can attract respect which the mainstream media has already institutionalize.
be it on style of writing, getting facts and organizing thoughts.
Speed is the only thing bloggers flaunt as absent in the mainstream media.
But what is speed against accuracy and susbtance.
Blogging I think will not replace the mainstream media, rather bloggers will eventually evolve as aprt of the mainstream media.
Only more sober, refine in language and grammar, well thought and well written.
Personally,I believe that there is no need to pit one with the other. Blogs has it own plusess and minuses and so does manistream media. They both have good reason to exist therefor there isno reason for them to kill each other.
sooner or later the blogsphere will eclipse the written media.
Sullivan is like MLQ3 x 10. He’s manolo’s paragon, I believe, but his blogging style only applies to very, very few bloggers. The blogging masses are totally different.
Who controls journalists and what we get on TV, Radio and Print?
Who controls bloggers and what we get in the Blogosphere?
Now of course at the level of individuals the barriers are entirely permeable.
Just imagine if all the bloggers in the Philippines worked for the Lopezes (ABSCBN), the Prieto-Romualdezes (PDI), or the various Crony Families that control Radio, TV and Print (less than ten).
It’s better that we all work for Google for nothing.
part of my comment here (updated version)…
ANC viewers will be able to READ YOUR LIPS when you talk about full disclosure in EDITING/UPDATING BLOGS in order to maintain credibility and when you speak about the effect of jumping to conclusions in the New Media.
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quotes copy-pasted from A Filipina Mom Blogger
The emergence of blogging did not eliminate stupidity or avarice. But it did eliminate the omnipotence and seeming omniscience of the Main Stream Media. It eliminated the monopoly of access to speak in the public domain and be heard. It vastly increases the competition in the free market for ideas.
Those who are in the MSM don’t like it. Just as the illustrative monks hated Gutenberg.
Thank you all for your responses, especially the one that was left by DFish and even these ones from DJB. Real nice info you got there.
Well, here’s my experience.
When I arrived in the United States in late (I won’t tell you hahaha!) sumtin’ sumtin,. I remember the Sunday Editions of both the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. They were THICK! Well, not anymore. Thank god! No more junk. Or so I thought. As a matter of fact, the Philadelphia Inquirer when it announced the loss of 15 percent of the Inquirers editorial staff many years ago, it was big news here in our city. We thought the paper would close down. The paper was saved. With less readership of course. But it is still alive. Now you begin to ask if print media will soon just be junk. Guess what, the last Sunday paper I bought? Half of it were advertisement. Not included are inserts.
I don’t know how it is in Manila, but I’m sure it’s not just in the United States where the effect on broadsheets has been fierce. It’s been many years now that print media kept losing its readers to the Internet with even steep declines in advertising revenue continuing. We’ve seen publication closures (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/29/business/media/29paper.html?_r=2&bl&ex=1225425600&en=63df0ce22e52f090&ei=5087&oref=slogin) at the same time, soaring internet revenues (http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1005549). Even broadcast media is fighting for those internet advertising dollars. Well, wherever the audience is.
Put the financial crisis aside, there were papers here in the US who has been doing round of layoffs even before that. When did the print industry ever witnessed a sold-out newsstand? Perhaps that day when Obama won – and maybe on the Obama inauguration. Will it survive as the internet saturates each and every household? Hmm…
Of course media will always follow where the great advertising dollars (pesos) are. Thus explains their big presence on the web. Wait, most journalist are even blogging now. I seem to think that marriage will be the end game for bloggers and journalist. U think?
Some monks stayed in the Dark Ages, some monks started Libreria San Pablo, when Johann started printing pages. Now the Web is here, one Ring to rule them all–TV, Print, Radio and the Blogosphere!
“Now the Web is here, one Ring to rule them all–TV, Print, Radio and the Blogosphere!”
hahaha! Harry Potter series it is. :-)
“Like a revolving social glitter ball, hanging above a dance floor, the reflections, the opinions found there – though they may cut like glass – often are as shallow and ephemeral as those little sparkles of light – and designed only to enhance the illumination of self glory through blog traffic.”
From a nightmarish experience with a certain blogger, who contends that QUOTE “Reyna Elena is a humor blog. Or at least, a trying hard one.” UNQUOTE
Attempts at such humour being by way of sharpening the knives, the Internet skills learned in such cold and mercenary pursuits as, for example “The Busby SEO Contest,” the technical prowess absorbed, the social contacts developed from years of “pro-blogging” – putting them in to practice – against one solitary human target.
Thank heaven that people like him have not got their finger on a button of more serious consequence than those found on a mouse.
With transparent and undisguised contempt, this tragi-comedic figure finds it fun to instigate and perpetuate an SEO campaign designed to bury, to swamp with sheer quantity, an obviously sensitive and personally emotive human story.
To acheive this end, the lowest end of the barrel of bad taste is plumbed and scraped, the long decayed bodies of ethical behaviour that once walked this earth during the Spanish Inquisition, are exhumed from their timely demise – and resurrected for his despicable intentions.
Pseudo-psychological analysis and torture, exaggeration & distortion of facts in order to trump up a charge, character assassination of a particularly vindictive style, incitement to hatred by false accusations of racism, open mockery, posting of insulting (funny) photographs – and most strangely, an attempt to insult me by insinuating that I was gay.
(See the many photo-shopped images that he himself laboured over – portaying me in “drag” – completely inexplicable – but surely a token of a severe derangement.)
And all of this – for an extremely dubious motive.
The covering up of one act of deception – an attempted emotional extortion, being no less devious for the fact that it did not succeed – with an even bigger deception – in order to protect the reputation of a powerful business concern.
I hear my detractors talk about ethics. Do ethics have a sliding scale?
Are those in opposition to me more or less ethical than myself, in the actions I took?
I have deliberated long and hard over my honesty regarding how I have evaluated everything that has transpired – being forced into that position by my rigid determination to honour my highest ideal.
Love – the intense emotional attachment I felt for a certain Filipina and her country – which encompassed all the hopes and desires for a personal relationship, including my emigration, our marriage, starting a family and business together.
I do not have to prove my credentials in this regard – but proof is there to see – least wise in my determination to find a satisfactory closure.
A closure that is needed because above and beyond anything else in this life, love represents my highest ideal, and I am not content to live with that ideal falling under a shadow.
I would never willfully partake of any action to injure the object of my love – nor would I willfully intend distress upon another human being without sufficient cause or reason.
The reasons for my actions are as follows:
a) To act as a lever to give me some purchase on the hope of discovering a truth, in a situation where and when I saw no other alternative.
b) Reaching out from the perspective of my highest ideal to ensure what that truth was.
c) To deter and warn – I could not remain silent for the sake of discretion, when perhaps another’s pain might be averted.
d) To inform – to educate. Crime can be unique – there need be no recorded, searchable precedent to support the validity of one’s judgement.
e) To record and demonstrate how deceit and corruption can influence perception – especially with regard to behaviour online.
If my resolve and my determination are interpreted as aggression, then so be it.
The truth is, that I now have an advocacy – a word I see quoted a great deal on the Filipino blogosphere recently.
Two immensely powerful passions have been awoken from their comfortable sleep by the events that have unfolded since August 2007.
My love for a particular person and her country – and my absolute craving for transparency, honesty, justice and ethics in behaviour online.
Yes – top marks must go to the aforementioned SEO campaign (complete with video interview) – for they have infiltrated with ease the territory of the sympathy vote – by focussing attention on to the girl.
They have done the same with the territory of national pride, by falsely inciting xenophobia.
They have acheived a complete distortion of my character, with their lies and exaggerations – in order to gain the justly contemptuous vote of those who are aware of the activities of sexual tourists – and will try to convince you that my intentions were similar.
A pretty clean sweep – very thorough.
The votes will all come from people who will not spare the time to think for themselves – perfectly prepared to jump on the bandwagon of consensus – or people who are not impartial – or thinking that it is of no concern to themselves.
But these people are already online, already using their Internet.
Are they content to let behaviour like this propogate?
If it cannot be dealt with when it is made visible – what chance is there of rooting it out?
Whereas I have scrupulously assembled, dissected and examined all of my causes for suspicion and have not given weight to any detail that is superfluous – I suggest that their activity was no more than a deliberate, malicious and devious knee-jerk, an orchestrated mobilisation of forces – which has not been backed up by the slightest scrap of evidence – not even bothering to sensibly address even those issues I have raised.
No – it has been an excercise of elusiveness, refusing to communicate with me personally despite many invitations – refusing to answer to my probing questions as to their first hand personal knowledge of these events.
Why have they been so elusive?
It is perfectly obvious – they have not got a single scrap – not a shred.
That is a most indefensible and unconscionable position to launch a propaganda campaign from.
Even when the video interview was made and launched online as a missile against my emotional defenses – they completely ignored, deliberately avoided searching for the smallest hint of absolute proof, relying exclusively on the sympathy vote – but unfortunately, in doing that, revealing their transparent aim.
So – Filipino voices – I have heard nothing yet.
What is your voice?
What is the true voice of your nation?
Is it a whisper, a shout, a scream?
Amidst all the intense political polemic here on this site, the intellectual debate, the open condemnation and loathing of cronyism, nepotism and corruption, is your voice going to be impotent through fear or apathy?
Isn’t it hypocritical to accept this sort of behaviour, just because it concerns some of your own?
And – please – Reyna Elana – spare us all your sense of humour.
Research Cyber- Bullies
Flag Day
Thank you.
Although this may sound unsuitable in relation to all of your concerns. Nevertheless, I’d like to have the space to voice how I feel especially for people who never had a way or an instrument to be heared. Most of these people are poverty-stricken, they can’t even see straight let alone be concern about matters of politics. You see some of them may be schooled but not educated. Most of them have accepted the fact that they’re going to be ignored by the people who supposed to reperesent them. They’re going to be seen like one would see a pile of garbages on the street. Come election time…same rhetoric, brainwashed and eventually moved on to another mundane and hopeless case scenario. So what else is new? We The People..we’re tired of being hungry, not having a job, not having health care, not having any decency in the ways of life, but the pain of knowing that there is no end in sight. These are our struggles. These are our voices. Some people take these things for granted and it’s so unfortunte.