Blogging now legit media?

brianthebard

Was watching Q&A the other night and Sarah Carey, a writer and blogger was on, giving her opinions. In The Independent I have noticed bloggers referenced several times, usually in relation to music or "pop culture". So has blogs become a legitimate mainstream media and what is the consequences, good or bad, of this?

silverharp

Has to be for good, a lot of media is now so biased based on their advertisers that blogs at least offer a more honest approach to reporting or commentary on reporting, one blog I read deals a lot with the housing market in the US, his analysis would rarely make it on mainstream media cos it would pi** of the advertisers.

flogen

It was always a legitimate medium, as it was a medium for information between the source and the public.

What's happening now is that the Irish mainstream media has accepted it - long after the likes of the UK and US. The difference I can see is that before the MSM treated a blogger as untrustworthy and the victim of a fad (but they were happy to follow leads started on blogs without attributing etc.) - now they've realised that blogging is what you make it and it has its worth... they're even citing blogs/bloggers as sources!

brianthebard

Do bloggers have the same opportunities to report on events first hand though? Just looking at the about me part of carey's blog (sarahcarey.ie) she pretty much states that she's a stay at home mother. So what she's writing must have already have been reported before she talks about it. Also some blogs might be mentioned, even quoted, but I haven't noticed any references to their websites or their names. Perhaps I just haven't read enough articles that reference blogs but I get the sense that a quote is just stuck in there to fill the text or bulk up the references. Don't get me wrong I see both good and bad aspects to this new changes, and I think its great that people can write about current affairs or whatever without being beholden to anyone, but it does seem to herald a shift towards more opinion pieces and less investigative reporting.

Eamo71

brianthebard wrote:

Was watching Q&A the other night and Sarah Carey, a writer and blogger was on, giving her opinions. In The Independent I have noticed bloggers referenced several times, usually in relation to music or "pop culture". So has blogs become a legitimate mainstream media and what is the consequences, good or bad, of this?

Great for Sarah, not so great for the viewers having to listen to her spouting on.
Her disasterous stint on the Geroge Hook show kind of confirmed to me that bloggers will never replace trained/experienced journos.

Eamo71

brianthebard wrote:

Do bloggers have the same opportunities to report on events first hand though? Just looking at the about me part of carey's blog (sarahcarey.ie) she pretty much states that she's a stay at home mother. So what she's writing must have already have been reported before she talks about it. Also some blogs might be mentioned, even quoted, but I haven't noticed any references to their websites or their names. Perhaps I just haven't read enough articles that reference blogs but I get the sense that a quote is just stuck in there to fill the text or bulk up the references. Don't get me wrong I see both good and bad aspects to this new changes, and I think its great that people can write about current affairs or whatever without being beholden to anyone, but it does seem to herald a shift towards more opinion pieces and less investigative reporting.

It depends. In IT, for example, some of the more well known bloggers will be invited to press conferences. A lot of newspapers such as the Guardian have their own blogging site so the people who work on that would be invited to press confs.
Other than that many bloggers blog on what;s already there before them.

Dublin's Finest

The Irish media is years behind on blogs. Look at the main UK newspapers: Guardian, Times, Telegraph. They have all incorporated blogs into their websites.

The Irish Times has tentatively set up its own section but it's poorly executed and, apart from Jim Carroll and Shane Hegarty (to some extent), it's not working that well. Why are they so afraid to be creative on this front? And why hasn't the penny dropped in Ireland that the media is shifting to a more participatory model?

There is a web-literate audience out there waiting to be hoovered up by the first paper that really goes for it.

damien

Sarah is a Sunday Times columnist first and foremost and has had considerable PR experience before that. She's got a fantastic contacts list. She was not on Q&A because she was a blogger, she just happens to have a blog.

flogen

brianthebard wrote:

Do bloggers have the same opportunities to report on events first hand though?

That's no a prerequisite for being a medium, though. It is a prerequisite for being a news media, perhaps.

The answer, though, is that bloggers are increasingly in a position to report on events first hand, at least in the US. It will grow here in Ireland and while I don't expect traditional journalism to be superseded, there will be more scope for bloggers to set some of the news agenda from time to time.

Eamo71

damien.m wrote:

Sarah is a Sunday Times columnist first and foremost and has had considerable PR experience before that. She's got a fantastic contacts list. She was not on Q&A because she was a blogger, she just happens to have a blog.

Was she not in fact picked up by the Sunday Times as a result of her blog? Ergo she was known as a blogger first and foremost.

silverharp

flogen wrote:

That's no a prerequisite for being a medium, though. It is a prerequisite for being a news media, perhaps.

The answer, though, is that bloggers are increasingly in a position to report on events first hand, at least in the US. It will grow here in Ireland and while I don't expect traditional journalism to be superseded, there will be more scope for bloggers to set some of the news agenda from time to time.

Another interesting feature is that there are groups of people who spend their time reading all the legislation passed in the US, where mainstream media would gloss over or only read the executive summary, the devil is in the detail and these people are filling a gap that the current media can't deal with. They also seem to be worried that some kind of right of response legislation will be used to attack this type of reporting

constitutionus

flogen wrote:

It was always a legitimate medium, as it was a medium for information between the source and the public.

What's happening now is that the Irish mainstream media has accepted it - long after the likes of the UK and US. The difference I can see is that before the MSM treated a blogger as untrustworthy and the victim of a fad (but they were happy to follow leads started on blogs without attributing etc.) - now they've realised that blogging is what you make it and it has its worth... they're even citing blogs/bloggers as sources!

you know ages ago i did a thread called "can the media do its job" or something along that lines and i think this is tied into that in that ive heard people on radio actually quote from threads on sites like politics.ie when defending their positons or postulating conclusions. more and more the mainstream media seem to be referencing opinon on the net or actively sourcing them.

on the one hand its kinda cool thas someone uses something i wrote but on the other i'll be the first to say ALL of what im saying is my opinion. ok i can usually back up what im saying with figures and cases but theyre drawn from other reports. im not an expert in those fields and i didnt write those articles so theres always the chance im wrong and its worrying if someone of prominance is just rattling off our ramblings as facts without checking em.

still with the prominance of smaller and smaller groups owning all the printed and broadcast media in the country its getting so the bloggs and boards are the only place you can be assured of at least possbily getting the unbiased truth. i mean its not like any of us are being paid to be here. we just have an interest in whats going on and how its reported. in that light its enevitable that they'll attain more credit. and as mentioned bloggers and even posters can be on the ground reporting (god almost like.....investigative journalists ) on events as they happen and you cant beat that. when you look at the love uslter riots last year some of the best coverage of it was on youtube with nary a professional to be seen !

FYI

From an interview with the Irish Times' Fintan O'Toole:

"MB - Going back to what you were saying about magazine journalism being absorbed into mainstream, do you see any reflection of that in the blogging phenomenon? The BBC, the Guardian and the Irish Times are all blogging.

FT - It's very similar. The mainstream are always going to try and absorb whatever is out there, and interesting people. It's not a sinister monopolistic tendency, so much as a desperate search for what the next thing is. And it's a generational thing. The people who run and edit newspapers tend to be older; the people who are doing new and interesting things tend to be younger. It's not in itself a bad process, what happened in the eighties and early nineties was a process which contributed to the narrowing of the media at that time - a lot of that was actually driven by advertising.

One of the things that made the relative flourishing of an independent magazine section possible in the late seventies early eighties, was when you had magazines such as In Dublin, Magill, Hibernia - a lot of smaller print media - driven, ironically enough, because they tended to be a little more radical and critical, by the advertising market. What made them economically viable was that you had a whole new breed of advertising agencies coming in, who for the first time were saying - we don't care about the politics directly of this, we care about who you are reaching. And they were obsessed with reaching young people, richer, more liberal people, who were perceived as being more receptive to different ideas. Therefore if you were running Magill, for example, in the early eighties, it wasn't that all the advertising agencies thought Vincent Browne was fantastic, liked everything he was saying etc, they liked the fact the magazine was being read by people they wanted to sell products to. That drove, in turn, the possibilities of a relatively more diverse media.

The absorption of this was partly journalistic, but also due to advertising. Agencies saw all these companies putting all this money into this advertising pool, which was taking away from newspapers. It was partly technological too. One of the reasons why the advertisers put their money in magazines, such as Magill, is that they were the only places you could have high quality colour printing. The newspaper didn't do that then. You then had a technological leap, whereby the newspapers bought colour printing presses, thereby absorbing some of the advertising and at the same time the journalists. Therefore it was narrowing the media. It is not accidental that some of those publications that survived have done so in a much narrower form."

http://www.mediabite.org/article_The-Corporate-Media---Part-1_474268952.html

brianthebard

damien.m wrote:

Sarah is a Sunday Times columnist first and foremost and has had considerable PR experience before that. She's got a fantastic contacts list. She was not on Q&A because she was a blogger, she just happens to have a blog.

No she says on her site that she had the blog first and the Times picked her up to be a columnist. Her title on Q&A was writer and blogger, which suggests she doesn't have that strong a connection with the Sunday Times. According to her own "about me" she is very much a blogger.

ntlbell

It always was "legit"

I think blogging in general will die off in the coming months/years and hopefully we will be left with a small number of well respected bloggers.

I think the reason it was taken up so quickly in the US and the UK is because of the quality of the writing and the content on a lot of different subjects.

Right now in Ireland we don't really have any "A-list" bloggers, we have Tom Rafferty who is suppose to be "A-list" but in truth it's just a big long moan with actually very little content.

I think the blog could be very powerful if used in the right way, and not for some gob***** to build a stage for himself where he can argue globally about some bad customer exp he had in mc donalds I just don't think anyone in Ireland is doing it right yet.

I know Damien.m has a popular blog and has done a lot in this area and promoting but even his blog is just random noise and lots more moaning, much like Tom's.