Weblogs and journalism - Summary and commentary

There's no doubt that weblogs are a way to communicate and give information, and that, more concretely, they are becoming a new category of news communication. Even though most weblogs have not been created in order to be journalistic, the way they share events can challenge traditional journalism.

Nowadays, the question around this fact is how important weblogs are, becuse they seem to be everywhere and around journalim. But, of course, they have their own characteristics (such as simplicity, brief and direct texts, possibility of publishing comments, hypertext links, and so on) and, depending the kind of blog they are, those characteristics also get changed.

There are four different weblogs: citizen blogs, audience blogs, journalist blogs and media blogs.

• Citizen blogs: they are also called watchblogs. Their authors don't pretend to substitute the journalist, but sometimes they take the role of a reporter. We can different 2 different subcategories: citizen blogs specialised on a particular topic and the amateur ones regarding neighbourhood events.
• Audience blogs: they are public blogs incorporated by media to improve the communication with their audience. Having them, they create kind of community feeling among the readers. They can be linked to newsroom work, bt most of them are just personal blogs.
• Journalist blogs: they are blogs writen by professional journalists, where they are able to publish things they don't write on the media they work. They have editorial freedom and they adopt a more interpretative position.
• Media blogs: this kind of blogs are the ones created by the media for their journalists, so they are set up inside their websites. Editorial and stylistic requirements are not as strict as on news and they don't have all the options blogs give (sometimmes opinions are restricted, for example).

There is another impoortant point around weblogs, which is that of the approaches used by them within the media. This is the case of the blogs created for the special events coverage, the ones around opinion columns and those specialized on news commentary.

Regardless of what each one thinks about blog, no one can deny their power in order to spread news and information, and the role they have already taken in the news sphere. Weblogs are part of communication 2.0, and we have to handle it.

Uxue Garro Irastorza

Journalism 61 - 4th Year

Changeable Monograph III - Online Journalism