The topic for today’s class is blogs and journalism. We already talked a bit about the development of newspapers when we were talking about Habermas and the public sphere. Today we’ll be more specific. Some of the matters we’ll touch:

• We’ll start by watching Epic2015
• What is Google News? What’s up with this “no human intervention=objectivity” thing?)
• In his book Gatewatching, Axel Bruns argues that we’re witnessing a shift from the gatekeeping of traditional media to the gatewatching of participatory media. A review of the book summarises somewhat.

Gatewatching hasn’t yet arrived at the University Library (mysteriously enough) but I have a copy if anyone’s curious.

• The report We Media is online in its entireity: “We are at the beginning of a Golden Age of journalism ó but it is not journalism as we have known it. Media futurists have predicted that by 2021, “citizens will produce 50 percent of the news peer-to-peer.” However, mainstream news media have yet to meaningfully adopt or experiment with these new forms.” The report describes the situation and proposes ways for traditional media to respond to these challenges.
• Academic paper by Daniel Drezner and Henry Farrell: “The Power and Politics of Blogs“
• Journalist Paul Andrews’ discusses whether blogs are journalism.
• Norwegian students should look at journalist, blogger and researcher Olav Anders ÿvreb¯’s research report on blogging and journalism His weblog, Undercurrent, is in English and often deals with blogging and journalist.
• Cyberjournalist.net is a fairly popular blog “that focuses on how the Internet, convergence and new technologies are changing the media.”
• Search Google Scholar and find lots more.
• Story dated yesterday: Associated Press are trying their hand at citizen media

Here are some examples of blogs that might (note: might) be thought of as a form of journalism:

• Salam Pax, the Bagdad resident who blogged during the initial attacks on Bagdad in 2003. His blog is still active, and the Wikipedia article on him gives the full story. Back in 2003, a lot of people doubted his authenticity, which has since been confirmed.
• Christopher Allbritton was an independent journalist who collected $15000 of donations to fund an independent trip to Iraq in 2003. That that even worked is sort of amazing. He has since been hired by mainstream media due to issues of safety – being alone in Iraq is lethal.
• There are many US soldiers who blog and post photos and videos while in Iraq. Is that a form of journalism?
• How about this Swedish woman who blogs while in jail? Here’s my blog post about her blog.
• Or all the Iranian bloggers who are banned from criticising their government but find ways to do so anyway online?
• What about someone like Drusilla who regularly picks apart articles in mainstream media?
• Or a website like Outside.in that tries to cover all the hyper-local news that mainstream media can never get to?
• And of course, bloggers scalped Dan Rather