Blogging: Journalism’s Amateur Hour?
Source: saunderslog.com
Nicholas Lehmann’s Amateur Hour is a rigorous dissection of the blogging versus journalism debate. Published in the New Yorker, it’s a deep and serious examination of the blogging phenomenon. Lehmann observes that blogging “conflates several distinct categories of material that are widely available online and didn’t use to be. One is pure opinion, especially political opinion, which the Internet has made infinitely easy to purvey. Another is information originally published in other media—everything from Chilean newspaper stories and entries in German encyclopedias to papers presented at Micronesian conferences on accounting methods—which one can find instantly on search and aggregation sites.&ldquo.
Throughout the piece. Lehmann makes the case that most blogging isn’t journalism. I agree, although there are definite exceptions lik. Om Malik’s GigaOm, and Mike Arrington’s TechCrunch. which ar. news oriented sites. I’ve often compared what I do on this blog to what the pamphleteers of another age did in their time; a comparison which Lehmann also makes. Lehmann also compares the many very local blogs, and personal sites to old style church and community newsletters.
Is blogging creating new content, or just a new medium for content. And will it, over time, mature into many categories and styles, as journalism ultimately did?
Worth a read.
