Blogs will supplement, not supplant, traditional forms of media
This column appeared May 31, 2001, in the Online Journalism Review. Here’s the version on the OJR site. See Part 1: Blogging as a new form of journalism.
Parts 1 and 2 of this series were included in the anthology We’ve Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture (Perseus Publishing, 2002).
Will Weblogs displace established media organizations as a source of news, information and opinion? Not in this lifetime. But they will continue to make inroads as a supplement to traditional news sources.
As Doc Searls, one of the deep thinkers in the blog movement, says: “It’s a matter of ‘and’ logic, not ‘or’ logic. Weblogs will inform old media. They will increasingly be a source of information that traditional media will rely on.”
The first Weblog has generally been ascribed to Dave Winer (interviewed below) in 1997. Blogs began taking off in 1999 with the launch of sites like Blogger, Weblogger and LiveJournal, which made self-publishing painless for the masses. While tens of thousands of blogs have blossomed, mainstream media have only recently shown a glimmer of interest in the form. [Read more…] about Weblogs: A new source of news