By JULIE MORAN ALTERIO
THE JOURNAL NEWS
(Original publication: January 26, 2003)

•Motorists fed up with rising gas prices •Motorists fed up with rising gas prices •United Cerebral Palsy under fire from union •July existing home sales rise to record •Royal Ahold expects to soon emerge from Scandal •Fire suit invented by Rye man •Software provides customer service centers the means to monitor millions of calls •Watch for moves in fund proxies •Ex Big Dig chief escapes fine •Verizon, CWA battle for public support •FTC warns of scam in Do Not Call signup fee

Don't have time to surf the Web for the latest news? A blogger can do it for you.

Whatever your interest — be it computers, politics or former child TV stars — there's a Web log out there with links to news about the topic.

Be prepared for an idiosyncratic tour of the Web. Bloggers express themselves both in their choice of links and the comments they make about the news.

The result is something completely different from mainstream media, says J.D. Lasica, senior editor for the Online Journalism Review and media columnist for the American Journalism Review.

"Now comes a new form of communication and interaction — more informal, less polished, but often more genuine and full of insights and points of view that often escape the conventional punditocracy," he says.

With Web logs, anyone with an Internet connection can be a printing press, publishing to an audience the size of the entire online world.

If Webster's says journalism is the gathering, writing, editing and publishing of news, do Web logs qualify?

"Absolutely," says Dan Gillmor, technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News in Silicon Valley. "Many bloggers apply techniques and standards that professional journalists apply."

Gillmor says his blog complements his reporting. "The blog gives me another way to interact with my readers," he says.

Most bloggers aren't journalists, Lasica says, "but many do perform a journalistic role."

"They take part in the editorial function of selecting newsworthy and interesting topics, they add analysis, insight and commentary, and occasionally they provide a first-person report about an event, a trend, a subject," Lasica says.

Even so, only a few bloggers engage in the first-person reporting typical of journalism, notes Web log expert Rebecca Blood.

"A reporter tries, to the best of their ability, to construct the whole story by seeking out a variety of witnesses and experts, and to convey that story as accurately as possible, for a general audience. Webloggers have no such mandate, nor should they. They are in the business of selecting links they think are interesting or important, and they make no pretense of being objective," says Blood, author of "The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog."

Blogs would be weakened by the mandates of impartial journalism, Blood contends. "We are strongest outside the traditional channels, as commentators on what the media reports, and how they report it," she says.

Unlike mainstream journalists whose authority rests in the imprimatur of an established news outlet, bloggers gain credibility from their track record alone.

"If they're credible and have something valuable to contribute to the public arena, people will return," Lasica says.

Some mainstream journalists, like technology writer Paul Boutin, write a blog to become more tangible to readers. Boutin, whose work has appeared in Wired, Slate and Salon, accepts that most of the audience he writes for uses the Internet as their primary source of information.

"I've no interest in becoming another loose cannon Net celebrity," Boutin says. "But having my own spot on the Net seemed like a good way to appear as a person rather than just a byline to my readers — avoiding that old image of the sniveling journalist hiding behind his typewriter."

Send e-mail to Julie Moran Alterio