Project

Excited to start the project in Weblogs and Wikis. Pretty sure I’m going to start a new blog following the Red Sox at spring training 2010!

Are bloggers journalists?

There is no certification or licensing process to become a journalist in America. Therefore, it can be assumed anyone who publishes material available for public viewing must be a journalist. The idea seems simple, but when issues such as anyone being covered by First Amendment rights come into play, the water is dirtied.
Los Angeles Times media critic David shaw argued that bloggers are not journalists and should not be covered by the same “shield laws” as other journalists because bloggers do not have experience, do not have editors, and have no standards (Daly). Some blogs can be outlandishly outrageous in their claims, however many blog sites give legitimate and solid news coverage often more quickly and more accurately than the news providers protected by the First Amendment Laws established today.
Outside of the U.S., efforts are being made to stop blogging all together. A story found on ironically enough, a blog web page devoted to the change of the digital media revolution provided by the Public Broadcasting Service, breaks news that over one-hundred bloggers in Iran have been arrested and taken into custody. After the Iranian election, police have cracked down on internet blogging in an effort to stop “fraud attempts, commercial advertising, and false information.” A special twelve man police force has been put together to hunt down such internet users and stop “insults and lies,” on the internet (Le Coz).
However, good investigative journalism is not free. And well experienced, prestiges journalists should not suffer from the swarm of novice writers like bloggers flooding the news waves. An inevitable switch to the internet providing most of a citizens news should not mean a switch to a lesser and diluted news. Good journalism and reporting can survive in the new age of new media, but needs the backing of committed readers to back and follow such reporting.
At the 2009 White House Correspondent’s Association Dinner, President Barack Obama was quoted to say that, “A government without newspapers, a government without a tough and vibrant media of all sorts, is not an option for the United States of America.” This statement is a true one. However, the platform of newspapers today could be different tomorrow. Due to today’s technological boom, illiteracy issues of Americans, and flood of internet citizen journalists, the print and ink-based form of news may sadly be loosing its once useful form, to a form more comparable to a forgotten antique.

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Still don’t understand exactly all the elements of blogging on wordpress. If anyone else out there has some tips or ideas let me know pleasssssse!

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