Blogging vs. Traditional News

Now more than ever, blogs are a source to which many people turn when they are in search of specific information or trusted opinions on a given topic. Personally, I rely heavily on food blogs, as I’ve found that the recipes posted there are more adaptable to the diet and income of everyday people than, say, those one might find on the website of a five-star gourmet chef. A growing concern as blogs increased in popularity was that they would radically transform the way in which people received their news, but I don’t think this is likely to happen. In Tony Rogers’ article “Can Bloggers Replace Journalists”, he argues that journalism and blogging are vastly different media animals, and I wholeheartedly agree. I am the Lifestyle Section Editor of The Meridian Student Newspaper at Lehman, and so I work on and with articles on a monthly basis, preparing them to go to print. I have also worked as a blogger for Obscura Literary and Arts Magazine. As a journalist, my job was to report the news; I researched facts and statistics, and conducted interviews to lend support to my findings. Blogging, however, was more closely tied to my own personal experiences, rather than someone else’s.

In the article, Tony Rogers addresses this contrast between blogging and traditional news, stating, “Expressing one’s opinion is very different from doing objective news reporting. And while opinions are fine, blogs that do little more than editorializing won’t satisfy the public hunger for objective, factual information.” He argues that blogging can be a useful tool to document important events, and therefore act as a supplement to news reporting, but cannot sufficiently replace that form of media. Citizen journalism, which is news collection and analysis by the public, can be performed successfully through blogging platforms like WordPress and Tumblr. An example of this might be during activist movements. Blogs can track the progress of a movement and report on both public and media response to it, as was the case at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement.

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