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.