CNET’s journalists are expected to answer every question that comes in through the blogs and reader comments, and get involved in every debate that has legs, reports The Guardian.
“The more that you demonstrate your trust, the more users will input into the community,” says Suzie Daniels, head of business media at CNET. “If you want to steer the conversation, even invisibly, you have to be in it and it is incumbent for journalists to be part of that.”
Interesting round in the Blog vs Journalism struggle with the recent Obama Barack claim. The Blogs helped to spread (of course some traditional media did this as well), claims he’d attended a radical Islamic school in Jakarta as a child. Of course, this was a crock. Yet it was the traditional media, Associated Press, CNN, that corrected the mistake.
Of course, it often works the other way, with Blogs correcting the mainstream press.
But the Obama episode does highlight what will be an increasing loss as traditional print shrinks further: a culture and training regimen of reporting rigor. Against the snickers out there, make no mistake, even the most muck-racking tabloid journalists know how to get the facts right. Technically, the people who put together the British tabloids are often very skilled.
Of course, Blogs are no more than a tool in the hands of their user.
It’s just not as embarrassing for a Blog to get something wrong as it is a newspaper or wire or decent TV journalist.
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Blogs are the only real way to say what you want and engage in an open debate and get your comments across and be read; whether your views are popular or not.
Some of the more pompous expatriate blog founders; like this one and others think that they are on some kind of Pulitzer prize winning journey; but the real purpose of a blog is let everybody let rip on everything and anything; something that can’t be done in the traditional media. It’s personal, but it is also open to total anarchic and fearless free speech from anywhere in the world and that is wonderful.
The person who controls this blog has closed and deleted postings by myself and perhaps others because he disagreed with the content or because they criticized him personally; when at the time he was championing the free speech rights of bloggers who are being censored and shut down in Malaysia. Hypocritical for sure; but it also indicates that if the bloggersphere becomes too moderated and pseudo professional and run by failed journalists and editors then it will become as boring, one sided and staid as the traditional media is.
Mr. Unspun;
Are you going to delete this posting as well and call it inane or are you going to stand up and counter argue if you disagree?
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Daryono: I’d be happy to have a conversation and engage in differing points of view if you’d drop the Brown Man’s Burden and argue honestly.
That means no dishonest argument tricks such as labelling and extending a point beyond its reasonable limits. No abuse of the word freedom as well.
You have the freedom to start your own blog if you think this one is too stifled. In which case I’ll be happy to tell readers to go there.
But this is my blog and I have the freedom to set its ground rules. You’re acting like a boorish houseguest who insists on telling the host how to mind his own house, and then yelling bloody murder when you are told to grow up or take your opinions elsewhere.
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Daryono
Why do you have to take a personal swipe even when there is no necessity? What’s your agenda? To make the loudest bang against the expatriates?
Man, one minute you were making some (even if it wasn’t a lot) sense and another minute I see only pond scum. Wake up, man!
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Unspun 
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