Assignment 2: Can blogs take over traditional news sources?

I believe blogs will not take over traditional news sources. Blogs are fun to read and are very important for people to discuss various topics but they do not provide the same factual knowledge as news sources do. On the other hand, they do provide freedom from the strict new sources that avoid articles that would hurt their investors or shareholders. According to the article, Why Bloggers Can’t Replace the Work of Professional Journalists by Tony Rogers, “the problem with having blogs replace newspapers is that most bloggers don’t produce news stories on their own”. Professional journalists dedicate years if not their entire lives reporting about a specific topic so they can be considered experts in that subject. One cannot deny the fact that a blogger can add an interesting outlook to a specific topic but it should not stand alone. Good blogs can supplement articles written in established news sources and I believe they are very important to provide different viewpoints to a single topic.

Blogging has become very popular within the recent years. It gave a new form of online expression to regular people but the problem now is that most popular blogs are not operated by a single regular person but by companies and multiple people. The article, The Rise of the Professional Blogger by Benjamin Carlson, states that “Of the top 50 blogs, 21 are owned by such familiar names as CNN, the New York Times, ABC, and AOL. And many blogs that began as solo operations are developing into full-fledged publications”. Many people probably saw blogs as a fun hobby but since it has gained a lot of popularity many people decided to make money off of it. This is why it is very hard for there to be singular person operating a blog because behind the most popular blogs are a group or dozens of people. This makes me wonder if blogging will lose its touch in the future. The chance is small though since people love blogs so that they can express different ideas and reach a lot of people without having to be professional journalists. The fact is that we still need journalists to research specific topics and deliver news from around the world and we still need blogs so that we are exposed to different opinions since blogs usually have more freedom than traditional news sources. It is good to have both the objectiveness of traditional new sources and the subjectiveness of bloggers so that we are able to have a proper discussion on different subjects.

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