Blogs and Journos
I'm doing some thinking and reading about weblogs and journalism. I'd like to write a somewhat longer essay about my take on the issue, and I hope to start writing something up very soon, like in the next day or so. I'm starting to think that the same sort of assimilation that happened to the Web will in time happen to blogs, especially given this article (link from Scripting News) where already journalists are starting to see blogs as sources of realtime feedback. DW adds parenthetically that "Uhhh Howard, we're not here for the corporations", but they may already be seeing non-journalist blogs as just another form of market research, not thinking of them as equals, or - even more unthinkable - potential competitors. This could be due to how journalists perceive their primary job - the distillation of diverse sources into a narrative - where the typical blog in their view is just another primary source which is not providing that same condensation of sources into The Story. Not that I necessarily believe this is true, but it's one possible surmise, based on this one article, how journalists are starting to see the value of what they would consider "amateur" weblogs. In any case, this is just off the top of my head, and I'm going to try to get something more coherent down soon.