JAK BOUMANS: Blogging as journalistic tool

Article

The information age started roughly in the forties with the first computers. It took some forty years to move from administrative machines to all round machines. But once internet was there, the culture started to change. This phenomenon was dubbed Web 2.0. Its major feature was the influence of the user. Also the pendulum in print and broadcast journalism is swinging from printed paper to digipaper and from analogue television to the mobile phone. One of the new Web 2.0 features is blogging, reports of people about their cats and guinea pigs, opinions about politics and professional reviews of conferences, books and movies. Blogs are incorporated in the media policies of newspapers and television and radio stations. BBC for example is riding the waves with applications like blogs, but the company is repressively tolerant; the company guards its name. Blogging can help editors pick up early signals of opinions and problems in society; it can stimulate public debate. Presently the media is still too arrogant to recognise the  professional bloggers. But with better tools like blog search engines and micro-chunking, journalists would be able to pick up signals from professional bloggers earlier. Media companies on the other hand could feed the bloggers by forwarding texts and transcripts of articles and programs.