Melissa Wall, (2005). Blogs of war: weblogs as news. Journalism 6 (2), 153-72.
· The Melissa Wall reading looks at blogs as a possible new form of journalism which emphasises personalisation, audience engagement and participation via independent websites. The reading does this via research into blog genre analysis and analysing the results within the context of a post-modern world view.
· News organisations have been defined in the past as gatekeepers to new information of public interest, and determine what context this next information will be interpreted in. I think that this definition is still true with much of mass broadcasting but is changing as blogging and other publications platforms, such a social networks, allows for online communities and networks to form creating more freedom of expression, and the publication of unfiltered content and opinion. It is this spread of different viewpoints and opinions that could create a better informed “collective intelligence” as the total sum of information would be much larger, and be from a broader spectrum of society.
· Blogs are not the first time in modern history that traditional journalism has been challenged as mentioned by Wall in an example from the 1960s, due to the social conditions in that era a “new” type of journalism was seen to develop which broke the rules by becoming less objective and presenting a change in writing style. Blogs could thus be seen as part of an ongoing process of journalistic evolution which occurs to meet the needs of an ever changing society.
· Wall looks at the relationship between traditional journalism and online journalism. Wall noted that Stovall identified that the journalistic process is unlikely to change, which I agree with, but I also thin that the traditional genre of journalism will remain the same but be less commonly used – perhaps adding to the value to the genre due to its scarcity. Today’s “New Journalism” will engage in new relationships with its audience and thus be seen as more popular, but perhaps not more valuable.
· As noted by Singer “journalism is about reporting” whilst online journalism will be about engaging in discussion and thus building new ideas and concepts as part of a collective free of the traditional gatekeeping hegemonies.
· Blogging presents a new non-linear form of writing via the use of hyperlinks to link source materials to blog posts – adding credibility and authenticity to these writings. In this period of transition it is also the readers who need to alter their expectations of what is being read and how they read as they are use to reading materials in a different genre.
· Blogs offer lowered barriers to entry by allowing ordinary people to become content creators which publish and distribute globally free of the restrictions of time and space.
· Bloggers seem to not generate original material and seem to remediate news from traditional news source within their own cultural and social contexts. This can bring bloggers into conflict with copyright and IP law issues – although the written word at moment seems less of an issue in this regard and it is the use of video and audio clips which seem to cause the major concern for mainstream media. During MED104 we have discussed that writers have been traditionally allowed to reference content and use quotes freely whilst audio and video do not have the same freedoms. I wonder if in the future as blogs become portals for new journalism that these restriction maybe found to be more strongly enforced in written words also – especially if the blogosphere becomes more commercialized and thus gate kept.
· Diminishing borders which separate producers and consumers has the possibility of challenging dominant knowledge frameworks by recontextualizing knowledge.
· New Post-modern journalism could consist of more localised niche news stories that would lead to a more personalised experience due to the niche communities that would form around these and thus the gatekeepers may be credible and trusted members of these communities as seen in the case of Wikipedia
· At the moment I think there is a cross over between old and new media where are converging to form a new genre of news reporting and increasingly citizen journalist content is being used as part of the economic rationalisation of news – why have reporters in the field when the audience can create content for free and create content at the time of the event. Thus news could become a platform for citizen journalism like YouTube is a platform for video where users supply the content,
· Blogs are no longer text based and can allow prod-users publish and broadcast in several different media genres via the central hub of the blog via a convergence with video, audio, images and text in the blogosphere and thus lend themselves more to citizen journalism and the new news paradigm.
· Wall’s research found that typically a current events blog is personalized, opinionated and one-sided. I think that as readers become for accustomed to consuming the new news media genre they will increasingly become attuned to filtering blog posts for bias and imbalances, and respond via their own blog posts or comments within the blog itself as a part of a participatory culture. Thus is different from old media as it tended to try and present both sides in the one article, due to its one way communicative nature which nurtured passive consumers – something which blogs don’t have to be so concerned about as they can form two-way discussions in a community and thus each post is only a fragment of the whole story
.
· Narrative Style: The personal nature of blog posts is the “key characteristic of how they frame the news” as this adds credibility to the content.
· Audience Relations: Walls notes that blogs cultivate produce-audience relationships by providing consumers the chance to participate in the production of content, and to interact with other members of their online community thus creating a “virtual town hall”. Reflecting on this I had some concerns that over a longer period of time consumers would trend towards blogs that agreed with their viewpoint and thus find communities of likeminded people with lessening influence from conflicting communities, and thus having little crossover between cultures and actually move away from the idea of “pop cosmopolitanism” posited earlier in MED104.
· Story Forms: As mentioned earlier, Wall posits research results that Blogs generally do not report new information and thus a representative of remediations. Thus blogs are monitoring mainstream news sources and recontexualising them within bloggers personal experiences, or the collective experience of an online community, by remediating mainstream content in a new personal or social context. These remediations of course could come into conflict with current licensing paradigm of copyright. I think having mainstream media as the central hub for current event news sites negate my earlier concerns of closed niche communities forming as they will all be drawn back the central information source of the mass media news and so maybe “news cosmopolitanism” would actually occur.
· Overall I agree with Wall that as society moves into a post-modern age that journalism would also mimic these societal changes. The genre of current events blogs could be indicative of this change as they challenge the traditional concept of news. This new genre will be more personalized and transparent giving the medium credibility, with the audience being the gatekeepers of information and determiners of authenticity. I would liken this audience driven gatekeeping to the peer-review in academic circles, and in Wikipedia. In taking part in this peer review process Wall noted a quote from Rheingold – “Consumers will participate in creating what they consume” thus per review will become a part of the creation process.
This leads me back to reflect upon remediation of mainstream media and the idea that as the blogosphere becomes increasingly monetized, and there nature becomes more multimedia based, that there will be increasingly a conflict with copyright law. I would have little doubt that corporations will try and make money out of something as prolific as the blogosphere and thus I fear it may in the new-news era become increasing difficult differentiate between blog-journalism and blog-PR just as it is in mainstream news today to tell the difference between news and PR.
The opportunities of the blogosphere to build a news based collective intelligence cannot be ignored but as mentioned earlier having mainstream media as the central hub for current event news sites negate my earlier concerns of closed niche communities forming as they will all be drawn back the central information source of the mass media news and so maybe “news cosmopolitanism” would actually occur and the traditional form of journalism will survive as a valuable source of debate and also as a key to traditional media outlets maintaining at least a fair part of their existing hegemony.
· The Melissa Wall reading looks at blogs as a possible new form of journalism which emphasises personalisation, audience engagement and participation via independent websites. The reading does this via research into blog genre analysis and analysing the results within the context of a post-modern world view.
· News organisations have been defined in the past as gatekeepers to new information of public interest, and determine what context this next information will be interpreted in. I think that this definition is still true with much of mass broadcasting but is changing as blogging and other publications platforms, such a social networks, allows for online communities and networks to form creating more freedom of expression, and the publication of unfiltered content and opinion. It is this spread of different viewpoints and opinions that could create a better informed “collective intelligence” as the total sum of information would be much larger, and be from a broader spectrum of society.
· Blogs are not the first time in modern history that traditional journalism has been challenged as mentioned by Wall in an example from the 1960s, due to the social conditions in that era a “new” type of journalism was seen to develop which broke the rules by becoming less objective and presenting a change in writing style. Blogs could thus be seen as part of an ongoing process of journalistic evolution which occurs to meet the needs of an ever changing society.
· Wall looks at the relationship between traditional journalism and online journalism. Wall noted that Stovall identified that the journalistic process is unlikely to change, which I agree with, but I also thin that the traditional genre of journalism will remain the same but be less commonly used – perhaps adding to the value to the genre due to its scarcity. Today’s “New Journalism” will engage in new relationships with its audience and thus be seen as more popular, but perhaps not more valuable.
· As noted by Singer “journalism is about reporting” whilst online journalism will be about engaging in discussion and thus building new ideas and concepts as part of a collective free of the traditional gatekeeping hegemonies.
· Blogging presents a new non-linear form of writing via the use of hyperlinks to link source materials to blog posts – adding credibility and authenticity to these writings. In this period of transition it is also the readers who need to alter their expectations of what is being read and how they read as they are use to reading materials in a different genre.
· Blogs offer lowered barriers to entry by allowing ordinary people to become content creators which publish and distribute globally free of the restrictions of time and space.
· Bloggers seem to not generate original material and seem to remediate news from traditional news source within their own cultural and social contexts. This can bring bloggers into conflict with copyright and IP law issues – although the written word at moment seems less of an issue in this regard and it is the use of video and audio clips which seem to cause the major concern for mainstream media. During MED104 we have discussed that writers have been traditionally allowed to reference content and use quotes freely whilst audio and video do not have the same freedoms. I wonder if in the future as blogs become portals for new journalism that these restriction maybe found to be more strongly enforced in written words also – especially if the blogosphere becomes more commercialized and thus gate kept.
· Diminishing borders which separate producers and consumers has the possibility of challenging dominant knowledge frameworks by recontextualizing knowledge.
· New Post-modern journalism could consist of more localised niche news stories that would lead to a more personalised experience due to the niche communities that would form around these and thus the gatekeepers may be credible and trusted members of these communities as seen in the case of Wikipedia
· At the moment I think there is a cross over between old and new media where are converging to form a new genre of news reporting and increasingly citizen journalist content is being used as part of the economic rationalisation of news – why have reporters in the field when the audience can create content for free and create content at the time of the event. Thus news could become a platform for citizen journalism like YouTube is a platform for video where users supply the content,
· Blogs are no longer text based and can allow prod-users publish and broadcast in several different media genres via the central hub of the blog via a convergence with video, audio, images and text in the blogosphere and thus lend themselves more to citizen journalism and the new news paradigm.
· Wall’s research found that typically a current events blog is personalized, opinionated and one-sided. I think that as readers become for accustomed to consuming the new news media genre they will increasingly become attuned to filtering blog posts for bias and imbalances, and respond via their own blog posts or comments within the blog itself as a part of a participatory culture. Thus is different from old media as it tended to try and present both sides in the one article, due to its one way communicative nature which nurtured passive consumers – something which blogs don’t have to be so concerned about as they can form two-way discussions in a community and thus each post is only a fragment of the whole story
.
· Narrative Style: The personal nature of blog posts is the “key characteristic of how they frame the news” as this adds credibility to the content.
· Audience Relations: Walls notes that blogs cultivate produce-audience relationships by providing consumers the chance to participate in the production of content, and to interact with other members of their online community thus creating a “virtual town hall”. Reflecting on this I had some concerns that over a longer period of time consumers would trend towards blogs that agreed with their viewpoint and thus find communities of likeminded people with lessening influence from conflicting communities, and thus having little crossover between cultures and actually move away from the idea of “pop cosmopolitanism” posited earlier in MED104.
· Story Forms: As mentioned earlier, Wall posits research results that Blogs generally do not report new information and thus a representative of remediations. Thus blogs are monitoring mainstream news sources and recontexualising them within bloggers personal experiences, or the collective experience of an online community, by remediating mainstream content in a new personal or social context. These remediations of course could come into conflict with current licensing paradigm of copyright. I think having mainstream media as the central hub for current event news sites negate my earlier concerns of closed niche communities forming as they will all be drawn back the central information source of the mass media news and so maybe “news cosmopolitanism” would actually occur.
· Overall I agree with Wall that as society moves into a post-modern age that journalism would also mimic these societal changes. The genre of current events blogs could be indicative of this change as they challenge the traditional concept of news. This new genre will be more personalized and transparent giving the medium credibility, with the audience being the gatekeepers of information and determiners of authenticity. I would liken this audience driven gatekeeping to the peer-review in academic circles, and in Wikipedia. In taking part in this peer review process Wall noted a quote from Rheingold – “Consumers will participate in creating what they consume” thus per review will become a part of the creation process.
This leads me back to reflect upon remediation of mainstream media and the idea that as the blogosphere becomes increasingly monetized, and there nature becomes more multimedia based, that there will be increasingly a conflict with copyright law. I would have little doubt that corporations will try and make money out of something as prolific as the blogosphere and thus I fear it may in the new-news era become increasing difficult differentiate between blog-journalism and blog-PR just as it is in mainstream news today to tell the difference between news and PR.
The opportunities of the blogosphere to build a news based collective intelligence cannot be ignored but as mentioned earlier having mainstream media as the central hub for current event news sites negate my earlier concerns of closed niche communities forming as they will all be drawn back the central information source of the mass media news and so maybe “news cosmopolitanism” would actually occur and the traditional form of journalism will survive as a valuable source of debate and also as a key to traditional media outlets maintaining at least a fair part of their existing hegemony.