Blogging and bloggers in the news!

Since the previous Information Minister made blogging out to be bad news, I am finding much cheer in the recent spate of pro-blogging overtures made by mainstream media. I am not talking about those controversial political blogs either but just bloggers having fun sharing their own experiences as Nicole Tan will be doing in her new column “Blogged Out”  in Star Metro. A travel blogger herself, Nicole’s maiden outing “Bring out the bloggers” is refreshing and great reading for new bloggers:

BLOGGING may not sound like a typical job, but it’s what I do. I am a full-time blogger and traveller but I also have an eye out for my education and am also a soon-to-graduate part-time online Masters student. While my friends and family may know me as Nicole Tan, to the blogging world, I am Nicolekiss and my travel blog – nicolekiss.blogspot.com - has a stable traffic of about 3,000 unique visitors a day.

New Straits Times, typically and following the lead of RTM with its weekly half-hour “Blog” programme, focuses mostly on politically-related blogs with their “What Bloggers Say“ but this article on Citizen Journalists caught my attention. It quotes the CEO of a Fiji Broadcasting Company as saying:

If citizen journalism is to be encouraged, journalists must be trained in how to use it as a tool to help crystallise events and information, he said. “While journalists are encouraged to operate within the boundaries of professionalism, it can be safely assumed that members of the public will be tempted to exaggerate or perform while before the public gaze. “Therefore, if standards of objectivity, accuracy and truth are to be maintained in the practice of journalism, then citizen journalism and every other development brought our way through advancements in communication, must be weighed against such standards,” he said.

In the same article, the perspective of Saed Jamal Abu-Hijleh, director of the Centre for Global Consciousness, Nablus, Palestine, really opened my eyes to the importance of blogging for marginalised communities::

“Accordingly, new forms of participatory journalism have emerged, expressed in an explosion in the number of blogs and citizen journalism websites that started to challenge the monopoly and hegemony of mainstream media on ’news production assembly lines’, and to challenge the ability of the big media conglomerates to set global news agendas deterministically as has been the case for many years in the past. “These changes are creating more opportunities for broader participation from the marginalised and colonised communities around the world. Thus, more space is available for these communities to report on unreported, misreported or unreported news in their localities,” he said.

Personally, I feel more young adults, those future leaders rather than aging politicians, should be encouraged to blog because blogging is a sure way to sharpen thinking, improve writing skills and stimulate creatve juices. They already have their Friendster, MySpace and Facebook and other popular social networking tools, now what they need is to do some serious writing on their thoughts and aspirations. Don’t just mimic their elders on political leanings but really say their piece on what they would like for this nation. Also, I’d like to see more science and technology blogs and expert blogs on a variety of subjects like “how to” type of information, much like what Nicole does on budget travelling. But for journalists who blog, there is an article on “Murky Boundaries” in American Journalism Review that discusses guidelines for the personal blogs of journalists who work for mainstream news organizations that really makes for thought provoking reading these blog-friendly days:

That argument didn’t last long, though. The market made the decision pretty rapidly. Today, journalists are blogging for their employers in ever-increasing numbers. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s 2008 State of the News Media report, “Fully 95% of the top 100 newspapers included blogs from reporters in March 2007, up from 80% in 2006.” What’s more, the study found that “the number [of] unique visitors to blog pages on the 10 most popular newspaper sites grew 210% from December 2005 to December 2006,” making up 13 percent of total traffic and drawing in a rapidly ballooning amount of advertising revenue. With editors across the country trying to take advantage of these realities, blogging for the boss has become almost ubiquitous in today’s newsrooms.

But when it comes to journalists maintaining personal blogs, the marketplace isn’t likely to help. Editors and executives are going to have to solve this split on their own. It’s not going to be easy, as it pits two pillars of the journalism world against each other: freedom of speech and the duty to remain objective.

First, if the Newseum’s 74-foot marble façade in homage to the First Amendment is any clue, the idea that journalists aren’t free to speak their minds creates concerns.

Second, there is a legitimate fear among editors of a public perception of bias. It’s an area where the media don’t have much margin for error: According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s 2008 State of the News Media report, 55 percent of Americans already think journalists are biased and 66 percent think they are one-sided.

As news organizations move forward in addressing personal blogs and other aspects of their journalists’ digital footprints, they should keep Pazienza’s story in the back of their minds. The fact that he got a lot of sympathy from people – even though, as he puts it, he “essentially napalmed the crap out of” his journalism bridges with what he did – says a lot. 

  ** Source of illustration is SFGate.com with their Tech Chronicles column: Blogging