During the genesis of blogging’s popularity people began to buzz with predictions that blogging could replace traditional journalism. People are still wondering that today as blogs are alive, well, and thriving. I think it makes a lot of sense why there would be so much speculation on this, but I do not agree with the idea.

The first article “Why Bloggers Can’t Replace the Work of Professional Journalists” presented some plausible arguments supporting the need for traditional journalism over blogging. Bloggers may expose people to certain ideas and shed light on stories that they may not have heard in the way that typical journalists would, however when accessing news there is a great importance for objectivity that a lot of blogs will lack. Journalists are trained to provide the public with fact based information and are generally held accountable when they do not. A blogger has the freedom of anonymity that means that they do not have to hold their work to the same standards of a traditional journalist. Roger’s suggestion that blogging could be supplementary to journalism was a wise way to describe one of the uses of blogs.

The Benjamin Carlson Article, The Rise of the Professional Blogger made me wonder: when it comes to professional blogging, where is the line between blogging and journalism? It seems it would be the dream of any unknown blogger to be discovered and employed by a publication, but would the quality of the work change? Would the content change? Is one able to freely express themselves when they go from doing something just because they enjoy it to doing it for a paycheck and representing a company?

“Why We Twitter” offers a perfect description of microblogging: “fulfills a need for an even faster mode of communication.”… “it lowers users’ requirement of time and thought investment for content generation” Microblogging is the way to get your news if you are on the go. You don’t need to be fully informed by it, but you are at least provided with soundbites and alerted to what’s important. Again, it’s no replacement for raw journalism, but it is useful.

Despite the fact that I believe traditional journalism cannot be replaced by blogging I do have a respect for what bloggers do and believe their work also serves a great purpose. They provide not only a place for people to share information, voice opinions, but they also foster a sense of belonging within the internet. This is an achievement that cannot be overlooked and something that traditional news is not really able to give us.

Blogs help create a sense of community as opposed to traditional news sources which are very closed and isolated. People are able to freely express themselves while sharing their passions and knowledge. Blogs allow an open space for everyday people to discuss things ranging from food, fashion, to politics as well as to find inspiration. However, I don’t believe that blogs can take over traditional news sources because both are in their own lane and should not be compared or put against one another. With that being said, many people try to downplay blogs and state that they are not at the same level as news sources. In the article “Why Bloggers Can’t Replace the Work of Professional Journalists,” Tony Rogers states that “The problem with having blogs replace newspapers is that most bloggers don’t produce news stories on their own. Instead, they tend to comment on news stories already out there — stories produced by professional journalists.” In this statement, he belittled bloggers by indirectly calling them nonprofessionals. It is disappointing to know that people have such negative stereotypes of bloggers, viewing them all as people who sit in front of their computers, relaxing at home, taking ideas and news from traditional news sources, and just adding their opinion. It brings about the question of what determines if a person should be labeled as a professional/real reporter. It is as though it is being stated that you need to be working for a top notch news station such as CNN to be looked at as being professional or worthy of gaining respect from the media world. Blogs are more beneficial to the current and future generations while traditional news sources are more relatable for the previous generations.  Another reason why blogs would not be able to take over news sources is because the only time a blog is acknowledged is if it is popular and is under a source such as CNN or BBC. In “The Rise of the Professional Blogger,” Benjamin Carlson states that “an immense proportion of the online readership—roughly 42% of all blog traffic—flows to the top 50 blogs. Users hunting for blogs typically end up directed by search engines to the same group of highly-linked, already popular sites.” This shows that everyday bloggers or “amateurs”  are underappreciated and never receive the opportunity to showcase their knowledge and opinions for many to see. For example, if you want to find out more information about fashion, you would only be taken to the highest ranking blogs that could help you with fashion. The main issue is that the older generations are afraid that since blogs are catching and keeping the attention of the youth, it will soon take over considering that “microblogging fulfills a need for an even faster mode of communication. By encouraging shorter posts, it lowers users’ requirement of time and thought investment” (Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities). Blogging is very much quicker than news sources and that is why many people in today’s society prefer it over the news from sources such as the New York Times. Since both blogs and news sources cater to different audiences, one can never take over the other and become more popular. It all depends on the type of person you are and what your preference may be. If you enjoy having open discussions, learning about something while considering someone’s opinion about that topic, or if you enjoy a modern way of keeping up with the current events, blogging is the route to choose. However, if you appreciate objective, factual information, a traditional news source is the way to go.

News is broadcasted live throughout the world and allows people to know what is going on. People look towards the news for the weather, new movements/ projects, sport news, and for politics. Our lives revolve around the news. Traditional news is broadcasted and is seen more than blogs. The only difference is that blogs tend to be more opinion based. Many news networks have created blogs in attempts to reach more of the younger audience. Carlson says “Of the top 50 blogs, 21 are owned by such familiar names as CNN, the New York Times, ABC, and AOL. ” The news broadcasting services are starting to realize that their audience is starting to lean towards blogs to see the latest news. News sources tend to reach the older audience and blogs tend to reach the younger audience. Both blogs and news sources will continue to be popular because each age group keeps it alive. Both news sources and blogs ultimately have the same goal, to give insight on an event or topic. In “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities” , it states ” Their findings indicate that blogs are used as a tool to share daily experiences, opinions and commentary. Based on their interviews, they also describe how bloggers form communities online that may support different social groups in real world.” Blogs can do something that newspapers can not, which is form communities online. Newspapers are able to instill an idea for a supporting social group, but it is unable to bring them together easily. People also use Twitter to post how they feel, their opinions on the latest news, and to find social groups of people that have similar ideals. Twitter allows people to track movements and follow politics. I believe that blogs can not take over traditional news sources only because the news is more factual. Blogs tend to give their opinion on an event/topic that was shown on the news. I feel like the both of them need to co-exist to keep them both flourishing. Without the news sources, there are no opinions to blog about. Without the blogs, there are no real opinions or online communities.

Blogging has become quite the sensation of the internet. It is something that was originally considered a sort of forum where anybody with an opinion could share that opinion with a willing audience. However, this no longer appears to be the case. In today’s world, large corporations have even taken over the blogging world. There is no escape from their grasp.

According to Tony Rogers, it never seemed to be that bloggers could take over and surpass journalists. To paraphrase, Rogers basically says that bloggers aren’t original – they write about stories that journalists have written. Furthermore, he feels that bloggers are more focused with sharing their opinions rather than neutral facts for public consumption. Despite this, it is quite fair to say that large news corporations have their own agendas that they wish for people follow. However, Rogers also speaks on the fact that bloggers are more than likely hobbyists in comparison to the journalists whose jobs are to research and write about the topics they publish. These are fairly strong reasons as to why small time bloggers themselves cannot trample traditional news outlets.

Benjamin Carlson also wrote about blogging and how large corporations are overtaking the industry. In his article, he states, “Even the new entrants are no mom-and-pop shops: National Review, Entertainment Weekly and Politico are among the owners, and one of the few independent upstarts, Seeking Alpha, is backed by venture capital.” In other words, even in the blogging world, the top blogs are run by the traditional news teams; hence, they are the ones delivering the information and removing the platform from small time bloggers. This keeps blogging centered around traditional news outlets but in the blog format. In this lens, blogging is in fact growing and flourishing outside of traditional news but it’s still the traditional news outlets that run the show.

Lastly, “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities” is about this new and extremely popular form of blogging known as “microblogging”. It is basically where people write blogs but in very text updates that pertain to basically anything they wish to share in that moment. This article talks about the popularity of Twitter and states “There are a total of 1,348,543 posts from 76,177 distinct users in this collection,” which refers to a data set that is counting the posts of microblogs on Twitter. It is a form of blogging that is growing tremendously and could possibly be the future of news and blogging as a whole.

In conclusion, while traditional news is capable of adapting to the times it is technically a dying breed. The companies themselves will continue to flourish but the way news has been shared is changing and will to continue to change. This could all be leading to microblogging being our main source of accurate news stories. It is a strong possibility that can’t be ruled out.

Not only is blogging a professional job, but blogging is also necessary because it gets the word out quicker. Many students and the younger generation read blogs online more than they check the news. I usually find out about important events through social media. As an active Twitter user, I tend to get most of my news alerts from Twitter. Although I prefer reading online sources or receiving alerts; bloggers need traditional news to make their own work happen. Most news channels even have a blog to support their own company. “Of the top 50 blogs, 21 are owned by such familiar names as CNN, the New York Times, ABC, and AOL.” (Carlson).  Big media companies are turning to the internet to keep up with changing times.

Traditional news gets broadcasted on the majority of the mass media channels yet they do not always reach the younger generations. We tend to look at our phones more than we look at televisions. Now that blogging is a professional job it has less of a sketchy feel when one reads a blog post. Twitter is a great example because anyone can say anything they want online. It can be false news or a hacked account yet we trust Twitter more than anything. Brief messages that are retweeted into dozens of other user’s timelines. Tweets usually get the message across.

The old way of watching traditional news has yet to lose its place in our society. But, blogging is on a huge rise. People are making careers out of blogging and are enjoying finding ways to get their point across. Blogs vary now from tweets, video blogs “vlogs” on Youtube, Tumblr, etc. Soon enough cable is not going to exist anymore with such large media streaming services coming along. So traditional news will have to relocate to the internet and social media. Technically, the traditional news itself is becoming a blog over time. The only difference that blogs and news have are their primary sources. News outlets have more connections and can access places easier than the average blogger.

Overall, as of now, traditional news has the most up to date information and it is hard to duplicate. Until bloggers can get the same resources as the news, they will always be second to the traditional way.

In the past,blogs were important but not as important. Anybody can make a blog, but some were not good blogs. Some people would make an opinion about a topic, but not have any facts to suppport their argument, or people would write a bad blog post about a resturant that they never have been to. Nowadays, bloggers actually write meaningful things, but they won’t ever be able to take journalists credit for their work. Their are some famous bloggers in the world, but that is out of a million people that blog. Journalists go to the places where they are making their stories as shown in the article, ” Why bloggers can’t replace the work of professional journalists, ” by Tony Rogers. He also said that while people have sterotypes about bloggers that are not true, most blogs only talk about their opinions, unlike journalists who get the opinions from facts that they got on the topic. He also said that many reporters have been following their topics for years, for example Adrian Wojnarowski who is a espn sports writer, but have been following sports for over 20 years. They hold more credibility over a blogger, who can most likely be writing about the topic for the first time. I found something interesting about bloggers. In the article, ” The rise of the professional bloggers,” by Benjamin Carlson, a well known blogger in the article, Laura McKenna writes that many known bloggers end up getting taking by professional writers, and the lesser known bloggers don’t get the attention that they used to, and know a days some people can’t even tell if a blog is written by a random person, or a professoinal writer. Now blog posts that are written, are owned by major writing or news organizations. This shows that now, major corporations are trying to take control of everything, as 10 years ago literally every blog post was written by a random person, now they are not written by random people, they are well known writers who write for maybe CNN or Enterainment Weekly or New York Times. As everything in the world is now about, blogs have been about money and exposure for the writers company. Blogs are now an extension of major companies ideas, instead of being a regular person idea. They are not blogs anymore, they are newspapers now.

All throughout the world, we see many media outlets find the latest story and blast it out to the world so we can retain this information. For the majority in medium history, we’ve seen everyone take time out of the day to hear the radio, watch the news or even pick up a newspaper to get their fill. In this day and age, it’s not about the information but how people react to it. Day in and day out, people create blogs to discuss an event that transpired but never really stop and look to see this event in its entirety to get the full story. This is why I personally feel that blogs will never take over traditional journalism, it’s not always completely accurate. It’s common to see many blogs online be shared amongst those who are heavily involved in the technological era where everything is accessible through your laptop, smartphone and even your television. The article “ Why Bloggers Can’t Replace the Work of Professional Journalists ” reinforces my views on bloggers by stating “Professional journalists hit the streets of the communities they cover on a daily basis in order to dig up stories important to the people living there.” And it’s easy to agree with this claim because bloggers really show themselves at the actual scenes where events happen, but they have a response to the article that was crafted by the actual journalists. So essentially, without the journalists who actually do the ground work then bloggers wouldn’t have anything to blog about. It’s fair to say that there is a new emergence of professional bloggers all around the world, some of them are even owned by major companies such as “New York Times”, “ABC” and even “CNN”. They are beginning to see this new style of journalism may not be traditional but it’s definitely effective. The article “ The Rise of the Professional Blogger ” states “Almost everyone weighing in agreed that blogging has become more corporate, more ossified, and increasingly indistinguishable from the mainstream media.”, meaning that blogging is solidifying its position in mainstream media all around the world and that’s a win-lose situation for society as whole. It’s a win because people who aren’t able to get information and/or lack the knowledge of particular platforms may be introduced to something that can keep them up to date in the rest of the world. But, it’s a loss because we see that day in and day out that there a several satire blogs whose sole purpose is to demean, discredit and spew out subjective information to get more clicks and even as a means to go viral. We know that there are several major news platforms that manipulate their content to get a certain reaction but there are some people who are popular purely off of yellow journalism and a large following of people who enjoy chaos being implemented in media. But to answer the question, I don’t not think bloggers will replace traditional journalism because without the latter then the former will not exist.

We all need to be in the know. Whether we listen to the current events on the radio, read it in the newspaper, watch it on television or online, or even read posts about it on Twitter, we all have the silent agreement that we just have to be in the now and in the know. There are many arguments for why blogging and micro-blogging shouldn’t be classified as the standard for traditional news, however there’s a point to be made that no matter what platform we’re getting our information from all that matters is that we are keeping up with what’s happening locally, on a national level and/or world wide.

The bigger concern is who we’re listening to. Tony Rogers, from Thoughtco, makes a good point when he says that there’s a difference between opinions and facts. Many bloggers today are putting their two cents into something that should just be pure facts, especially when these same bloggers are implying that they are doing a news report. Something I learned with Twitter posts and popular users is that they’ll report up-to-date information, but subtly add their own opinion. Rogers states that, “being a real reporter involves finding new information, not just commenting on information that’s already out there.” According to this study,  Twitter posts and the amount of users on the social media website increased rapidly (by the millions) over the span of a few weeks in 2007. This goes to show that anyone can micro-blog, and millions of people out there can give various pieces of information all that can either be reliable or unreliable- subtly opinionated or not opinionated at all.

However, does this mean we shouldn’t trust blogs at all? Not necessarily. Some blogs are owned by actual news sources such as CNN and The NYTimes, according to Benjamin Carlson of The Atlantic. Much of the information being given out is trustworthy, or at least can be trusted to a certain extent (given that CNN is notoriously known for making up their own facts sometimes, or even exaggerating stories).

Melanie Beltran

MCS 244

February 3, 2019

When surfing on the internet, one has a good chance of coming across a blog that could potentially appeal to them. The blog could be relative to fashion, makeup, fitness, interior designing, lifestyle and more. There is a debate about whether or not blogging has taken over the traditional way people receive news. The open question is are journalists irreplaceable? In the article, “Can Bloggers Replace Journalists,” the content that blogs produce as opposed to journalists, are more or less comments to what has already been reported. Journalists are going out of their way to find, unlock stories and report it for the public. “The problem with having blogs replace newspapers is that most bloggers don’t produce news stories on their own. Instead, they tend to comment on news stories already out there — stories produced by professional journalists. Indeed, much of what you find on many blogs are posts based on, and linking back to, articles from news websites.” This is viewed as an issue because journalists produce the hard work in finding or discovering news and blogs just make comments on events already public. What journalists do is conduct proper research first instead of having a bias opinion on what was found. “The Atlantic, The Rise of the Professional Blogger,” glorifies blogging and how it has become such a huge part of the media. Its own marketing has benefited bloggers in terms of blogging becoming “…more corporate, more ossified, and increasingly indistinguishable from the mainstream media.” It is doing relatively well for itself as a business and was successful enough to continue to make money and have people support blogging. In the article, “ Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities” microblogging has become very popular amongst society with the social platform of Twitter. People that have made posts regarding media, their personal and other things have skyrocketed. The number of times someone uses Twitter has only increased over the years (depicted in figures two and three). Blogging has been a way for people to connect and comment on issues that are popular in mainstream or popularizing a topic that may be overlooked in society. Using social media platforms like Twitter has only shown an increase in usage, making it a habit and possibly a luxury to have in one’s life.