In an article from summer of last year (13th June 2002) Phil Gomes , self styled "free-thinking, non-flacky, high-tech public relations pro who ... actually knows what the &%$#@ he's talking about" makes the equation:
"Blogging = Journalism. Q.E.D." (his italics)
Has journalism been revolutionised through the medium of the Blog? Is Moveable Type the biggest thing since Caxton (geddit?)? Phil quickly recants from this manifesto with the blogservation (sic) "While many career journalists bring journalistic integrity to their own blogs—offering an incredible amount of previously unattainable insight to their more traditional works—this represents a very small part of the blogging population.", and argues that blogging is more a case of meta-journalism "in that the best blogs rely on traditional news outlets to provide fodder for thoughtful discussion and commentary relative to the communities they represent". Interestingly enough, in the same article Phil made the prescient prophecy "but the day may come when we'll find that traditional news organizations will cover what matters to a community, while the bloggers will deliver what really matters to that same community", which indeed came to pass a year later in the coverage of the war in Iraq as we outlined above.
A major news story initially given short shrift by the major media that was kept on the boil by bloggers was the Trent Lott fiasco. The Wired article concludes with "What we're seeing more and more are webloggers breaking niche stories, and thus serving as an early warning system for traditional journalists."
The Online Journalism Review is the blog home for exciting news stories from the realm of media online such as "Tough Road for Spanish Online News" and "SARS Kills Webbys Gala". As such it shows us the professional face of journalistic blogging activity and keeps us abreast of controversies such as "CNN’s decision to shut down a popular blog from war correspondent Kevin Sites". This whole controversy is worth reading about if only because it illustrates the growing influence of the Blog medium in professional journalism.
Since the Blog lowers the barrier to publishing to almost zero surely the medium must undermine traditional publishing and enable an increasing number of people to make a living out of writing? In Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing Clay Shirkey argues to the contrary. He posits that "mass amateurization is the web's normal pattern" and that, in terms of making money, weblogs destroy both intrinsic and extrinsic value associated with traditional print publishing so that "by removing both costs and the barriers, weblogs have drained publishing of its financial value" - why pay when one can get quality content free?
But some famous bloggers have been able to ride the wave to finiancial success; according to the Guardian's report New Biz on the Blog "US-based, right-wing British blogger Andrew Sullivan recently netted around $79,000 in donations from his readers during a "pledge week" in which he appealed for funds to keep his site running." Other entrepeneurs (or fat cat capitalists depending on your point of view) are investing small capital sums in ventures that seek to build a readership in part from audience generated content; "thin media" or "nanopublishing" are content-minimal jargonesque descriptors employed here.
However, bringing us down to earth, Joe Clark considers that it's "time to cut the cheese", that "user-contributed content may have outlived its usefulness in E-commerce", and he concludes that, at the end of the day, consumers desire quality content whether they are willing to pay for it or not.