:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::

:: 2.25.2003 ::

:: "Web logs are journalism" ::

Blogging comes to Harvard
By Paul Festa, CNET News.com
February 25, 2003, 4:00 AM PT

This is an interview with Dave Winer regarding his fellowship at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society. Winer will head up the fledgling Blogs at Harvard Initiative.

"Before becoming blogging guru to the academic elite, Winer founded and was chief executive of Millbrae, Calif.-based UserLand Software, which specializes in content-publishing tools and services. He wrote or contributed to a number of relevant specifications, including SOAP, XML-RPC, RSS and OPML. He is perhaps best known for launching Scripting News, one of the Internet's longest-running Web logs."

EXCERPT:

What impact has the blog had on the way information is shared, particularly with respect to journalism?
In some areas, like tech reporting, the Web logs have largely replaced the professionals.

Hey, wait a minute.
News.com might be the exception. Think about what the landscape looked like five or 10 years ago, with just a handful of publications instead of a whole industry. People now get the information from each other and for each other using Web logs. There are still professional journalists writing, but a lot less. Web logs are journalism. Have they had a big impact? Absolutely. When a big story hits, I don 't necessarily trust the professional journalists to tell me what's going on. If I can get the Web logs from the people who were actually involved, I'll take that.

A really remarkable thing came out from the BBC, where they asked amateur photographers to send them pictures. So they're jumping onto the trend that's going to grow and grow and grow. With the Columbia disaster, where did the pictures come from? Not from professional journalists.

posted by me

:: 10:46:00 AM [+] ::
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