Online Newsgathering: Research and Reporting for Journalism

3

Blogs as a Newsgathering and Reporting Tool

Blogs represent some of the more interesting developments for the publishing world since the arrival of the Web more than a decade ago. The question of whether blogging is journalism is relevant and is discussed in Chapter 4. But if anyone should blog, it should be journalists. Yet non-journalists threaten to overwhelm the “blogosphere”, leaving journalists isolated in their castles of print. The “blogosphere” consists of all the content built by blogs, moblogs, video blogs, vodcasts, and podcasts (these terms are defined later in the chapter).

In 2005, the Pew Internet & American Life Project reported that by November 2004 blogs had established themselves as a key part of America’s online culture. ...