The Internet’s Impact on News Media
New communication technology, including accessible online publishing software and evolving mobile device technology, means that citizens have the potential to observe and report more immediately than traditional media outlets do. Swarms of amateur online journalists are putting this technology to use, on open publishing sites such as Indymedia and on countless weblogs, adding a grassroots dimension to the media landscape. Bloggers and other amateur journalists are scooping mainstream news outlets as well as pointing out errors in mainstream articles, while people who’ve been made subjects of news articles are responding online, posting supplementary information to provide context and counterpoints. Increasingly, the public is turning to online sources for news, reflecting growing trust in alternative media.
While some traditional news outlets are reacting with fear and uncertainty, many are adopting open publishing features to their own online versions. The Guardian and other mainstream media outlets have added blogs to their sites. The BBC’s web site posts reader’s photos, and other sites solicit and use reader-contributed content. Mainstream news outlets are increasingly scanning blogs and other online sources for leads on news items, and some are hiring journalists from the blogging ranks. Journalists are blogging live from courtrooms, from Baghdad, and elsewhere, allowing them to post frequent updates in near real-time.
As the public turns toward participatory forms of online journalism, and as mainstream news outlets adopt more of those interactive features in their online versions, the media environment is shifting, slowly and incrementally, away from the broadcast model where the few communicate to the many, toward a more inclusive model in which publics and audiences also have voices.
General Articles and Reports
We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information by Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis
Here Comes ‘We Media” by Dan Gillmor
Terms of Authority by Jay Rosen
Will the Web and Blogs Change How We Govern—and Are Governed? by Joichi Ito
Participatory Journalism Puts the Reader in the Driver’s Seat by J.D. Lasica
The Internet and its Journalisms, Part I: A Typology of Online Journalism by Mark Deuze
The UCLA Internet Report: Surveying the Digital Futre, Year Three
New Journalism: Examples of Mainstream Media Interactive Web Sites
The BBC’s Plans for Digital Democracy by Sian Kevill
OhmyNews Makes Every Citizen a Reporter by Yeon-Jung Yu
A new brand of journalism is taking root in South Korea by Dan Gillmor
Citizen reporters write for South Korean site
The Note ABC’s weblog
Glenn Reynold’s Blog at MSNBC.com
Articles on Blogs and Journalism
A Blogger Manifesto: Why Online Weblogs Are One Future for Journalism by Andrew Sullivan
Bloggers
of the Left, Unite!
Blogs are becoming the medium of choice for politically attuned members
of the digital generation. Like talk radio, they are dominated by the
political right. Why has the left ceded this potentially influential medium
without a fight?
Blogworld: The New Amateur Journalists Weigh In by Matt Welch
Borg Journalism: We are the Blogs. Journalism will be Assimilated. by John Hiler
Blogosphere:
the emerging Media Ecosystem
How Weblogs and Journalists work together to Report, Filter and Break
the News
by John Hiler
Blogs Blur Line with Journalism by Julie Moran Alterio
Blogs Make the Headlines by Noah Schactman
Moblogging
Moblogs Seen as a Crystal Ball for a New Era in Online Journalism by Howard Rheingold
Weblogs Get Upwardly Mobile by Jane Perrone
Resources
Amateur Hour: a blog about the "me" in media
Many2Many a group weblog on social software
The Media Go Blogging: Columbia Journalism Review’s list of big media’s blogs
Journalism.co.uk online news for online journalists
The Cyberjournalist List A directory of blogs by professional journalists
Columbia
Journalism Review’s September/October issue is dedicated to
new media alternatives
