When Bloggers Commit Journalism

In the article entitled"When Bloggers Commit Journalism", published on the Online Journalism Review, three professional journalists discuss how more and more bloggers are taken seriously in reporting the news. The journalists who participated in this discussion were Dan Gilmore, business columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, Scott Rosenberg, managing editor of Salon, and J.D. Lasica of the Online Journalism Review. Also included in the panel were veteran Bloggers Rebecca Blood (author of The Weblog Handbook) and Meg Hourihan (co-author of We Blog ).

The key points made by the panelists are as follows:

1) "[Blogging] provides an opportunity to get more information about stories, to create a more direct dialogue between people who are reading the information and people writing the information. I think it changes the way stories are reported and the relationship between the news producers and the audience." ~ Meg Hourihan

2) The web blog community is important and journalists are able to interact and get feedback from their readers

3) "Journalists are already doing things with the weblogging tool that they wouldn't have thought possible a couple of years ago. That may be why you had some of that resistance at first, the sense that it was going to become institutionalized, and the purist ideal of the blogger as the lone word slinger, beholden to no one, would be placed in jeopardy" ~Scott Rosenberg

4) One of the main issues facing journalists today is editing.

5) Another criticism of bloggers are that they are "passionate amateurs."

6) A benefit that most bloggers have is that they are specialists in their particular niche.

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