Okay, so what is the deal with blogs? I don't understand why people have blogs or why people feel compelled to have them. I'll tell you someone who doesn't care for blogs -€“ me. I just don't get blogging or bloggers. Honestly, if I wasn't required to keep a blog for this class, I wouldn't have one. The main reason that I don't have a blog is because I just don't have the time. If I had extra time during the week, especially a couple of hours, which is the time I estimate it takes me to create posts for this blog, I would hope that I would do something more useful with my time, such as sleep.
Now, I'm not saying I hate blogs; but, some people do. After a quick "I hate blogs" google search I found that quite a few people love to blog bash. What's interesting though, is that most of the "I hate blog" websites that I found are actually blogs. The "Oh God. Make it Stop. I hate Blogs" blog was rather interesting, €but I digress.
So what separates a blogger from a non-blogger and why am I a non-blogger? Well, I don't chitchat a whole lot and when I talk to someone, and especially when I write, I try to choose my words carefully. So basically I don't have the time, nor would I want, to sit down and write about all the things I did today and even if I did have the time and wanted to it would take me forever because I would have to re-read and re-type what I wrote a billion times. No thank you!
With that said, I have not only revealed why I don't blog, but what I think a blog is. Well, actually, what I used to think a blog was before I took this online journalism class. Before this class, I thought that most bloggers were a bunch of Joe Schmoes ranting and raving about their life. And I think until a few years ago that was probably true and most news organizations thought the same.
I, like many news organizations, eventually caught on that many bloggers weren't just creating posts about the ins and outs of their day and that the people who were reading blogs actually found some news value in what they were reading. So here is where blogging began to impact journalism but to what extent will it affect journalism in the future.
J.D. Lasica says in Blogs and Journalism Need Each Other that "weblogs should not be considered in isolation but as part of an emerging new media ecosystem -- a network of ideas." From this perspective, it appears that blogs will become an even more important part of journalism. Lasica also says that many people tend to forget that the derivation of the word journalist means someone who keeps an account of day-to-day events.
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