They come in all ages, races, languages and political persuasions. They copy and paste with gusto. They take blurry photos (very often of themselves). They are the myraid members of the blogosphere. And, they are growing exponentially. But, are bloggers valued members of the journalism community, or are they charlatans, posing as professionals and stampeding for press passes and goodie bags?
The power of bloggers can’t be denied. He who commands the attention of the masses can influence popular perception and opinion. The following of a powerful blog can rival the hordes behind spiritual healers and politicical movements. Ask yourself, who gets more attention? The Prime Ministar or Perez Hilton?
Understandably, there are lots of different ideas on just how much we should embrace bloggers in the media community. Journalists must go to school for years, slave at internships and earn their stripes in many different ways before they even get the chance to reach readers at reputable publications. Bloggers are regular people, working at their own pace in a largely unregulated online arena. Why some become popular and others don’t is oftentimes a mystery and perhaps, a bit of a popularity contest. All they need is an internet connection and a computer to potentially access millions of users. Is this fair??
As is obvious, we here at five-star-survey are bloggers ourselves. We think it might be a conflict of interest for us to suggest whether or not bloggers are real journalists, and so this week’s ‘Poll’ will be strictly write-in. Here’s the question:
Are bloggers ‘real’ journalists? How do you decide whose blog to read?
The Team at Five-Star-Survey *****
Bloggers can write interesting content but unlike journalists they don’t have editors ;-]
Journalists are trained professionals with codes of practice and a responsibility to report facts. Bloggers, on the other hand, are free to express opinions and the belief that certain points are fact.
In our modern society both have their place. I tend towards reading what I find most entertaining in blogs but for factual content it’s mainstream journalists every time.
i think bloggers come in several different categories and we just havent decided how to separate them yet.
there are bloggers who are as talented as any journalist, and there are bloggers with nothing much to say.
don’t forget that bloggers are free to report stories that traditional news channels won’t pick up or that organizations try and suppress. what about the phillipina employee that tweeted about dswd goods just sitting in warehouses and not actually being deployed to further the humanitarian campaigns they were designated for? that’s an important story, but one that most likely couldn’t have been spread effectively in any other way.
Independent bloggers are not journalists, but it’s great that the Internet has given everyone the chance to express themselves and voice thier opinion publicly. People go to read the kind of blogs that are written by real people because their writing expresses opinion that is rarely masked by a hidden agenda and in most cases already supports their follower’s existing opinions.
I think there is a lot of synergy between bloggers and journalists – there’s no reason one cannot be both. One key difference, as stated already is that the journalists have codes of practices and a lot of red tape surrounding them, whereas bloggers dont.
Most people also dont realise that top end bloggers are real businesses – the highest earning blog earns around $200,000 per month!