“What is a weblog? A weblog is a form and a format: a frequently updated website containing entries arranged in reverse-chronological order. But this simple form is infinitely malleable, and weblogs have huge potential for professional and private use. Easily maintained via computer or mobile devices, weblogs are organizing businesses, creating and strengthening social ties, filtering the World Wide Web, and providing a platform for ordinary people to publish their views to the world."
(Rebecca Blood at http://www.blogtalk.net/)

The Internet has changed the way we live by giving us unfettered access to an unprecedented amount of information around the globe. Though it has given us a new communications medium, many of the presentation strategies used to view content online – like magazines and newspapers – are still just emulations of existing models of distribution. A weblog (commonly known as a “blog”) represents a fundamentally different entity that embraces the unique abilities of the Internet to give a single user the publishing power to reach a potentially global audience. It is a medium that was born on the Internet and could not exist in its absence.

Nine years ago, a freshman at Swarthmore College first began keeping a running online log of websites he found interesting. Other web enthusiasts began to do the same, sometimes annotating their links with commentary. Some began to update daily, and eventually they began to link to each other, creating communities of sites that would come to be known as blogs.

In recent years, the number of weblogs has exploded. Some estimate the number of blogs at around half a million, though estimates are always questionable because users frequently quit old weblogs to start new ones (Wired). At the heart of the growing blog phenomenon is software technology that has evolved to simplify the process of self-publishing, extending to the average online user the ability to easily create and maintain their own blog. Sites like blogger.com offer free services that provide ready-made templates and detailed instructions on how to maintain a site. This technological accessibility has opened up the medium to anyone who has the urge to express their opinion.

Whereas professional journalists are paid to write about topics that will appeal to mass audiences, the low cost and technical ease of starting a website means bloggers are not restricted to any topic. Indeed, although blogs retain consistent formats (timestamps, archives, and permalinks that connect to individual posts), they cover the whole spectrum of interests that are as diverse as the people who run them. There are personal diaries and daily journals that are deeply introspective or sarcastically dry; they can be written by celebrities or monosyllabic comic-book characters. Other blogs can focus on technology issues or Internet culture, while many are dedicated to unique personal obsessions. But perhaps the blogs that are receiving the most focus as of late are those that serve an interactive journalism function. While the entire blogging phenomenon is significant in ways that will be touched on later, the remaining discussion will deal exclusively with news blogs that deal in political issues and opinion journalism because they are particularly well-positioned to affect public opinion and policy issues.

“Blogging is changing the media world and could, I think, foment a revolution in how journalism functions in our culture.” – Andrew Sullivan in Wired.

Introduction

Several online authors have established their sites in the upper echelon of eloquent, well-informed, and constantly updated blogs: Glenn Reynolds (www.instapundit.com), Andrew Sullivan (www.andrewsullivan.com), Josh Marshall (www.talkingpointsmemo.com), and Mickey Kaus (www.kausfiles.com), whose website is hosted on the online news magazine Slate.com. I urge readers who are unfamiliar with news blogs to visit these sites before reading further into this analysis.

Blogs Versus Journalism

There is an immense amount of news content on the Internet, and the average user has neither the time nor the patience to constantly wade through the media flow and find issues and stories that are relevant. That is why traditional news organizations have always served the editorial function of telling the reader what the most pertinent topics are. Blogs – which consist of annotated links to media sources and other blogs – filter through the staggering amounts of content available, organize it into manageable pieces, and place it in context with quick and incisive commentary, thereby wresting this editorial control from established media and placing it in the hands of individuals. After all, pointing one’s browser to andrewsullivan.com is just as easy as going to nytimes.com. The very nature of the Internet allows single authors to maintain online presences that are capable of being on par with those of well-respected journalism sources.

Information has thus become more democratic. As one online commentator writes, “I do believe that the global network and easy-to-use Weblog tools, RSS feeds etc. have fundamentally changed authorship. It has been democratized, and pushed down from the small, theoretically-highly-expert, professional cadre that were the norm in broadcast media to include a wider group of both amateur and professional authors who are the norm in peer networks like Weblog communities. (Gulker)”

This changing dynamic has instigated a debate on how this new form of Internet journalism will affect the existing media world. It is unlikely that one medium will come to dominate over the other because they are complimentary, utilizing the strengths and weaknesses of each other to work more efficiently. Whereas blogs rely on the media to produce news stories to comment on, reporters read blogs for story tips and ideas on where public opinion is headed.

Editorializing

Perhaps the most significant difference between the old school and new school mediums are the influences of editors. In established media, the editorial process strives to make an article as good as possible before printing and distributing to the masses. Participants in this process sometimes deride blogs because of the seeming absence of any sort of editorial control. Bloggers often publish speculative reports that would never make it through a normal review process at a newspaper. Instead, "the editorial process . . . takes place between and among bloggers, in public, in real time, with fully annotated cross-links (Rosenberg)." The benefits to this process are two-fold; first, blogs are able to explore issues that no self-respecting news source would touch, and second, ideas and facts are treated as starting points for discussion as opposed to the permanence of news media.

Accountability

There has always existed the question of truth in journalism, and that question now applies just as much to weblogs. How do we know that what we are reading is reliable and accurate? There is a built-in accountability mechanism in blog communities, simply because anything one blogger says is immediately open to comment and criticism by everyone else in the blogosphere. In addition, the rise of blogs has increased the awareness that traditional journalists working under the nameplate of a famous news source can be just as fallible and biased as the stranger blogging from his home computer. Blogs have taken accountability in journalism to a whole new level because no longer is news distribution a one-way discourse. Normally, the only recourse available when one had a problem with a newspaper report was a letter to the editor that may or may not get published, or one could simply just throw the paper away. Now, blogs give such people the voice to spread their complaints to the world, opening up a dialogue about the ideas contained in the information that never before existed.

Analysis

The unique characteristics of both new-media blogging and old-media journalism can and have combined to produce powerful results. Take for example Trent Lott. In December of 2002, then-Senator Lott made a comment during a function for Strom Thurmond that went unnoticed by the news press and was hidden deep inside a mundane ABCNews.com brief. The next day, Josh Marshall made this post on his blog:

I've always thought that for all the jokes about age and longevity in office, the one line that really captures how long Strom Thurmond has been around is this: he ran for president against Harry Truman. Do you really have to say any more than that? Of course, Thurmond ran as the presidential candidate on the "States-Rights Democrat" or "Dixiecrat" ticket -- a candidacy that was based exclusively and explicitly upon the preservation of legalized segregation and opposition to voting rights and civil rights for blacks.
There's a sort of agreement in Washington these days -- with Thurmond's retirement and hundredth birthday -- to sort of forget about all that unpleasantness.
But look at what Trent Lott said about that candidacy yesterday...

“I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had of followed our lead we wouldn't of had all these problems over all these years, either.”

Marshall continued to comment on the incident, and his points quickly spread through the blogging community (see examples from Instapundit.com here then here, and from Andrew Sullivan. Reporters took notice of this new controversy and began covering it themselves, culminating in a political fiasco that ended Mr. Lott's senate career.

"Joshua Marshall, whose talkingpointsmemo.com is must reading for the politically curious, (is) more than anyone else, responsible for making Trent Lott's offensive remarks the issue they deserve to be," noted Paul Krugman in his New York Times column. And so it will continue that blogs and journalists will inform each other to create more pointed dialogues about what is important.