I belong to a United Methodist Church. I share this to give
an idea of part of my make-up as it pertains to communication. I am also a
certified lay speaker for the United Methodist Church. When Methodism started
as a denomination, John and Charles Wesley made great use of lay preachers. A circuit
preacher would ride his circuit and visit a particular church or city once a
month so that he could serve communion. This is important to note because that
meant that for the rest of the time the church was run by lay people. People,
who had no formal training but who cared enough about their faith and about their
churches, were put in charge of the churches and were responsible for the
preaching. This is just one example of an organization allowing “common” people
to communicate with a larger audience. This is something that blogs now do.
They help to give voice to common people. This can be considered a good thing because of
the natural characteristics of independent online journalist, otherwise known
as bloggers. I must make a distinction here and that is the fact that I am not referring
to those who use blogs for personal reasons. There is a large number of people who share
personal stories and use blogs as sort of a cathartic exercise and this is not
a bad thing but, from a journalistic standpoint, not particularly useful or newsworthy. I believe that blogs can be a good thing but there
needs to be some work done before it can be considered a viable option for
news.
It is natural to
consider that if it is a good thing to get more bloggers involved in the news
process then there must be something wrong with the traditional process of
journalism. To be sure, John Stewart in his satirical news show, The Daily Show with John Stewart, spends
a large amount of time criticizing news organizations. In an article in the
journal, Journalism, Mark Deuze from
Indiana University writes about a commonality found in most journalists from
all around the world. Deuze wrote that “comparing
21 countries, Weaver found support for claims that the characteristics of
journalists are largely similar worldwide.” This, by itself, would not
necessarily be a bad thing. It could be considered good that journalists are
very similar because at least that guarantees a certain level of
professionalism from journalists. However, there is more to consider. Deuze
also wrote that some critics have stated that it is this view that is to blame
for “the news media’s inability to engage citizens.” Journalists seem to have a
problem connecting with their audiences and this has resulted in a loss of revenue
for newspapers. In an article from stateofthemedia.org they discussed the loss
of advertisement revenue that newspapers are feeling.
Here is one of the graphs:
But the graph also shows that the advertisement revenues are not
being picked up by online sources. This is a curious phenomenon unless you take
the culture of the internet into account. In his TED talk James Surowieki made
the point that most bloggers and people sharing information online are doing so
for free. If this is the case, then it would be natural that companies do not
have to spend as much money on advertisement. But, if revenue is the measuring
stick for the outreach of a particular medium, then blogs would seem to be less
pertinent than traditional journalism.
In several TED talks and a couple of articles, there is a focus on
the collaborative nature of blogging. This is not to say that blogs are written
by multiple people but through multiple contributors to a particular blog
website we get a more complete view of a particular story. Again, Surowieki
during his talk told of a phenomenon that occurs when a group gets together to
make a decision. With multiple inputs comes the likelihood of a better quality
of content. There was a danger that Surowieki warned of though. That is the
fact that this only works if people stay independent in their thought. Serena
Carpenter, an associate professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism
and Mass Communication at Arizona State University did some research and found
that citizen journalism (bloggers) largely wrote about controversial articles
all from one viewpoint. So, it would seem that bloggers are more likely to
share a viewpoint than traditional journalist. Carpenter also found that online
newspaper articles were more likely to quote an official source (75%) than bloggers
were (30.3%).
I give this information to make the determination that both
newspapers and bloggers can stand to do their job a little bit better.
Newspapers seem to have a more professional approach to the dissemination of
information. However, it does not matter how professional a group is if the
information that is be disseminated by them is not being read by the public. It
would behoove the newspapers to incorporate a way to meet the cultural needs of
their readers. By this, I mean they should find a way to put out good
information in a personable way that their readers can relate to. In her TED
talk, Mena Trott, talked about how the stories told in blogs were what
interested people. It is this narrative form that many newspapers are missing.
They take a cold approach to stories that should perhaps have a little more of
a “human touch” to them.
Blogs, on the other hand, need some professionalism added to give
them some credibility. They do not use as many credible sources as newspapers
do. Whether this is due to laziness or if they just do not have access to good
sources is irrelevant. People need to have good information if the internet is
to be a viable medium for news. It is refreshing that blogging is still more of
a labor of love rather than revenue based (for the bloggers not the companies
providing the service to the bloggers) because this helps to ensure that
whatever news is given from the blogs, it is not funded by special interest.
Or, even if it is, it is fairly apparent who the special interest is rather
than having to dig through some news company’s funding. Blogs have a lot of
potential for being a viable news source. It is really up to the bloggers and
to the online community to ensure that this happens so that, like in the
Methodist and so many other communication traditions, even the “common” person
has a voice.
Carpenter, S. (2008) Source
Diversity in U.S. Online Citizen Journalism and Online Newspaper Articles.
Retrieved from https://online.journalism.utexas.edu/2008/papers/OnlineCitizenJournalism_Carpenter.pdf
Deuze, M. (2005) What
is journalism?: Professional identity and ideology of journalists reconsidered.
Journalism. Retrieved from http://jou.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/6/4/442
http://www.ted.com/talks/james_surowiecki_on_the_turning_point_for_social_media.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/mena_trott_tours_her_blog_world.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/mena_trott_tours_her_blog_world.html
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