According to Andrew Sullivan's recent article titled Why I Blog, blogging "heralds a golden age for journalism." Rather than a brand new medium, the web log is an extension of previously existing journalistic forms.
In a sense, blogging is a merger of print and broadcast media. Sulivan says that “the key to understanding a blog is to realize that it’s a broadcast, not a publication. If it stops moving, it dies. If it stops paddling, it sinks… For bloggers, the deadline is always now.”
For these reasons, Sullivan notes “blogging rewards brevity and immediacy.” The very term 'blog' embodies the essence of the nascent genre in all its pithy brevity. In fact, the term dates back to the days when a ‘ship’s log’ was an actual piece of wood that was floated behind the ship.
In her piece outlining a primitive form of blogging ethics, Rebbecca Blood calls blogs “the mavericks of the online world,” for their propensity of disseminating information to a wide audience while simultaneously being outside of the mainstream media.
Blood goes onto point out that the blog's “greatest strength — its uncensored, unmediated, uncontrolled voice — is also its greatest weakness.”
To counter this weakness, the ethics Blood encourages in blogs fall mainly in the lines of control of truth and credibility. Simultaneously, blogs cannot afford the freedom of expression because "that make[s] weblogs so valuable as alternative news sources."
Bloggers have no alternative motivations to placate advertisers or corporate sponsors. Their sole responsibility is to their audience and to themselves.
The Internet may change what and how people write, but it cannot alter the fact that people continue to write. For this reason, Dennis Mahony penned a collection of instructions on how to improve blog writing. “Great writing can’t be taught, but atrocious writing is entirely preventable,” Mahony says.
An overriding theme of Mahony’s is that “declarative sentences are good. Web readers demand pith… The writer’s goal is clarity.” This is very similar to Sullivan’s claim and even to Shakespeare’s quote that “brevity is the soul of wit.”
Although it maybe revolutionary now, blogging will become as regular and accepted in modern culture as any other form of news media once we discover how to better regulate and understand blogging. Blogging is already pervasive enough that I helped to compose a site on effective blog writing.
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A note on the title: 'Man Bites Dog' is the term used to refer to the journalism phenomenon wherein strange, unusual news will be reported over typical events. In this trend of thought, it is no great stretch to imagine a dog biting a man. But the event of a man biting a dog is newsworthy.
ReplyDeleteThis concept carries over into the world of blogs, but these lines of typicality become blurred. In any event, I liked the play on words.