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Where News, Journalism and Weblogs Intersect

The following links provide information about new forms of personal journalism — including weblogs, collaborative news sites, personal broadcasting, and more — as well as pointers to examples of each genre. Have other links you’d like to suggest? Tell us.

• The New Media Resources collection at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism has published an earlier version of this page.

The published articles are presented, weblog-like, with the most recent articles first.

Last updated December 2003

Weblogs

Introduction to blogging:

Blogging for Beginners: What You Need to Know to Start a Weblog
Jeremy Wagstaff
Wall Street Journal, July 10, 2002
Introduction to weblogging.

Blog Nation
James Wolcott
Business 2.0, May 2002
Random musings on the addictive nature of weblogs.

Business pros flock to Weblogs
Martin Wolk
MSNBC, April 15, 2002
Smart look at how businesses have begun to incorporate weblogs.

Targeted serendipity
Anni Layne Rodgers
Fast Company, March 2002
A timely and intelligent look at weblogging.

Blogging
Jeremy Wagstaff
Loosewire blog, February 2002
A general look at weblogging.

A Day-by-Day In the Life
Leslie Walker
Washington Post, May 16, 2001
An accessible beginner’s guide to weblogs, with a good sidebar on weblog resources.

Been ‘blogging’? Web discourse hits higher level
Glenn Fleishman
Seattle Times, April 1, 2001
A good primer on the weblog phenomenon by a blogging tech journalist.

Invasion of the ‘Blog’: A Parallel Web of Personal Journals
David F. Gallagher
New York Times, Dec. 28, 2000
Well-done piece that interviews the founders of Pyra and Blogger.

You’ve got blog: You’ve Got Blog How to put your business, your boyfriend, and your life on-line
Rebecca Mead
The New Yorker, Nov. 13, 2000
Piece does a wonderful job of explaining the culture of personal weblogs to folks who aren’t especially tech-savvy. And don’t miss the Deconstruction of ‘You’ve Got Blog’ on Fawny.org.

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This article appeared in the September/October 1996 issue of The Skeptical Inquirer, the journal of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, an international organization.

By J.D. Lasica

palm”This is very, very unusual,” Emma says, leaning closer to inspect the whorls on my fingertips and the lines on my right palm. She pauses for a heartbeat and raises her eyes. “This is going to just knock you out of the water, Joseph.”

I ease forward in the cream-colored armchair, keeping my feet flat on the carpet, careful not to cross my energy. I peer down and study the lines of my palm. I look for patterns. Instead, I see a jumble of cracks and creases. Mostly, I see chapped skin.

But what do I know? I’m not the expert here. Emma is. Emma (not her real name) is a spiritual counselor, a palm reader, a numerologist, a clairvoyant, a practitioner of the divine sciences. She is, in a word, a psychic — by reputation, one of the top psychics in Northern California, I am told.

Emma fixes me with a soulful stare. “Are you ready for this, Joseph?”

I am ready. For I’m sitting here today, in the sun-splashed living room of Emma’s ranch-style home, for precisely this reason: to get in touch with my inner path.

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This is a sidebar to Blogs and journalism need each other, which appeared in the Fall 2003 edition of Harvard University’s Nieman Reports.

By J.D. Lasica

What benefits do Weblogs bring to journalism? Several.

Pushing the envelope. Weblogs are helping to expand the boundaries of experimental forms of transaction journalism. Freelance journalist Christopher Allbritton, a former reporter for The Associated Press, asked his Weblog readers to finance a trip to Iraq at the outbreak of hostilities there. Some 320 people donated $14,334 and helped him launch Back-to-Iraq.com, and then served as his editors during three weeks of dispatches during which he broke news on the fall of Tikrit and highlighted the Balkan-style ethnic tensions between Kurds, Arabs, Turkomen and Assyrians. [See Allbritton's story on page TK.] Similarly, freelancer David Appell, a physics Ph.D. who has written for Nature, asked his readers to donate $20 apiece to fund his investigation of the politics of the sugar industry. He wrote a report after raising $425.

Influencing at the edges. We see sentiments first expressed on Weblogs bubble up into the mainstream media days or weeks after they first surface in the blogosphere. Similarly, all too often the mainstream media tend to dispose of stories in a fast-paced news cycle, with even important news events falling off their radar screen after 48 hours. Bloggers say, hold the phone, we’re not done with this yet. Blogs keep stories alive by recirculating them and regurgitating them with new angles, insights and even newsworthy revelations. Weblogs were credited with helping to get the mainstream news media interested in the racially insensitive remarks by Senator Trent Lott that led to his resignation as Senate majority leader.

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The transparency of blogging has contributed to news organizations becoming more accessible and interactive

This article appeared in the Fall 2003 edition of Harvard University’s Nieman Reports. The article was accompanied by a sidebar, How blogging benefits media organizations.

By J.D. Lasica

Suggest to an old-school journalist that Weblogs have anything to do with journalism and you’ll be met with howls of derision. Amateur bloggers typically have no editorial oversight, no training in the craft, and no respect for the news media’s rules and standards. Does the free-for-all renegade publishing form known as blogging really have anything to do with journalism?

Well, yes. Consider:

* During the peace demonstrations in February, Lisa Rein took to the streets of San Francisco and Oakland, camcorder in hand, and taped video footage of the marchers and speakers, such as Rep. Barbara Lee, Harry Belafonte and antiwar activist Ron Kovic. She posted the video on her Weblog, complete with color commentary, providing much deeper coverage of the events than a viewer would get by watching the local news.

* At technology and media conferences, such as PopTech, South by Southwest and Digital Hollywood, bloggers in the audience have reported conference events in real time, posting photographs, speaker transcripts, and summaries and analysis of key points a full day before readers could see comparable stories in the daily newspaper.

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