Blogging for Journalism?

Blogging. It's a funny old thing. Well, it's not really old and to be fair most aren't particularly funny. But one thing we can certainly be sure of is that it is a thing. A thing that exists for a purpose, whether we like it or not. A thing that was created out of a necessity for normal people to voice their loud, obnoxious opinions and tell the world what's happening in the world.

In the past few years Blogs have become a source of competition to the traditional journalism universe, especially print media who are slowly learning to embrace this idea of 'opinion' from a 'normal person' via that thing called the 'interweb', or something along those lines. I've never particularly considered the function of Blogging to be a substitute for journalism. The majority of them seem to focus on people's own little worlds, which is fair enough I suppose (people seem to find themselves more interesting than anyone else ever would) and a few blogs that I have come across are entirely opinion based, a sort of free for all editorial where anything goes and everything can be a target. An example? Maddox a foul mouthed, opinionated bastard who's soul aim within his blog is to rile the masses by, pretty much, telling his version of the truth.

Maddox: Self confessed owner of the Best Page in the Universe

But back to the issue at hand, is all this blogging nonsense journalism? The describer of words, the Dictionary, says that journalism is:

"1.the occupation of reporting, writing, editing, photographing, or broadcasting news or of conducting any news organization as a business."

First things first, the Dictionary considers journalism an occupation. Blogging isn't particularly considered a job. Bloggers have the opportunity to earn a bit of bread money via services such as Google's AdSense, but it's a bit difficult to really say that this is a bona fide career choice. Chances are, even if you pull in millions of readers that have an attention span longer than ten seconds, you'd only really be earning a slight bit more than a Gap worker in India. So no, blogging is not a career, at least not right now anyway.

As the definition kindly tells us, news is a key part of traditional journalism. Funny that. There are blogs that cover developments in many different fields, such as Collision Detection, a blog devoted to the world of technology and nerds and H5N1, one that focuses just on the pressing issue of Avian Flu, a subject that the likes of the BBC and Sky have completely forgotten about, until the next epidemic. These examples, and I'm sure a lot more, are clear indicators of blogging as journalism. They report news stories, often of a particular area of interest, and therefore of course count as journalism.

I think (and that's the key point) the biggest thing to consider with blogging is the independence it offers. Some people will be keen to share the latest news on 50's comic book horror whilst others will just use the technology to let people know how they felt about something. Essentially, be it journalism or not, the biggest victory blogging has over more traditional mediums such as newspapers is its ability to inform us of millions of opinions. Not all of them matter, and not all of them are right or fair, but to be able to have the chance to speak our minds, instead of being spoken for, is a massive jump in freedom and opportunity. Use it wisely.