With ever increasing Internet users, web logging or blogging as popularly known, has now transformed into a serious business and probably moving towards the best form of web journalism. Though this is a debatable issue whether bloggers can do journalism but a more powerfully connected blog or blogger can be equivalent to our traditional or mainstream media house. But as of now there is a thin line that always differentiates both.
Traditional print journalists never give recognition to web journalism questioning the credibility of web content and the ethical values involved. Though we can’t compare a blogger with a journalist; but can’t deny that blog, as a medium has been more interactive to share information than any other tool.
Mainstream Media is now becoming more and more participatory and it is not only the author/reporter of a story but the readers who can have their say making it a two way track. News channels are now inviting citizen journalism to cover some specific story and let them present in their own way.
Blogging has nothing to do with the betrayal of journalistic values in terms of content editing, original reporting, and ethics. These objectives would be always a set parameter for our traditional media. But blog or web journalism has its own style of writing.
Today, all mainstream media, newspapers have their own news website to provide their content on the World Wide Web, however the content needs to be different if not completely, as online readers have a different taste.
At the same time bloggers too need to learn some basic skills of print media as the inverted-pyramid style of news writing; that puts the important information at the top, better headline writing so that reader could move beyond the first paragraph of the article. The other most important thing that every blogger has to keep in mind is the accountability. As there is no institution or organisation to watch each and every blog, each blogger should have set his or her own standard in terms of accuracy and putting right thing at the right time.
As we are talking serious blogging, every blogger has a sense of understanding that any wrong information in its blog can not only weakens his credibility in market, but also the entire community he belongs to. So this doesn’t seem to be a big issue and people even professional journalists now depend more on the facts and figures on web or info on some special blogs.
Now a blog is no more a set of links or collection of stories or personal diary, but a strong medium to communicate with a larger audience with updated information and hence by doing its selfless service has transformed itself into a part of active media ecosystem.
|
|
Comments:
