Bogging versus journalism will forever be an ongoing debate. Undoubtedly there are distinctions between blogging and journalism which may spark a discussion however, is there a sharp distinction between the two disciplines? I think the two have merged together over time. Using a popular site known as fashionbombdaily.com, I have reason to believe it is both a blog and journalist site that provides readers with what they want. What started out as fashionbomb.blogspot.com solely about shopping grew into content about celebrities, particularly in the event that publisher and founder Claire Sulmers was asked where songstress Ciara received her dress she was wearing. With a fully productive staff the site is a space to showcase all things celebrity and fashion using multiple social media sites that include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and Pinterest to network and inform celebrities when they’re being talked about and in turn, sometimes celebrities will retweet a link to their followers which means their fans will come to the the site for the latest scoop. The site is very thorough and consistent on the news they provide for their readers. At the same time they also encourage their readers to help in providing information that may be difficult to retrieve at times. Almost 10 years in the blogosphere the site’s credibility has never been waivered or questioned making it one of the top sites for daily insight in the celebrity world.
Are curls slowly taking over the blogosphere?
At one point writing and talking about natural hair wasn’t as popular. What once was a small section of Youtube has evolved into a community of people dedicated to helping others understand what’s growing out of their heads. The transparency that is created and upheld by bloggers and members of this discourse community make understanding and participating easy for everyone. Two blogs in particular that are Naptural 85 and Mo Knows Hair. With the influx of naturals that are coming into their curls and sharing pieces of this personal journey, the room for growth is endless.
Newspaper to News Blog
This blog is about how news reporting and viewing has changed since the evolution of digital media. The number of people getting their news from blog instead of the traditional mediums of newspapers and radios has drastically declined. In comparison, the number of people who turn to news blogs to discover facts, views, and perspectives on stories is on an upward trend. In this blog, I discuss the advantages and disadvantages of getting the news though digital media. I hope to make the point that the news is just as important as it always was but now we can have more of a connection to it.
A Look At Millennial Discourse Communities
The assignment was to write a review about a few strengths and weakness I discovered through researching different genre of blogs. To my surprise, I discovered a prominent theme through all the blogs I found and it was this. There has been a mass marketing strategy towards the millennial generations (Gen-Y) because they are seen as profitable consumers of technology, food, and so on. Many millennials, myself included, are trying to find a niche in a discourse community. A few turn to creating a personal blog, others expand to broader blogs like Elite Daily, while others navigate to find a community. My presentation will explore three blogs that I believe can help pioneer the millennial discourse community and inspire other millennials to connect to the community. It is my contention that the millennial population are surprisingly progressive from previous generations and it is important to cultivate an ecosystem for them to share their ideas.
The Non-Shady Post About a Shady Blog.
This presentation is a quick introduction into “The Shade Room” blog. The blog offers readers quick insiders to the hottest celebrity news, fashion tips, and unraveling social issues. This blog unlike others such as “Entertainment tonight”, “Access Hollywood” , or even “TMZ” is designed in a way that specifically understands its audience and targets them in a way that has made the blog a huge success.
Blog Presentation- HONY
Abstract
In today’s world there are few things we don’t find online, news articles, weather forecasts and even banking. However with the influx of information available to us we don’t often get to see a human side to blogging. Humans of New York was created in 2010 and have grown into a global phenomenon garnishing millions of followers. The author has managed to incorporate current social happenings with a date, time and individual. The stories featured on the blog range from pulling at your heart strings to making you laugh but all the while giving a virtual voice to users who otherwise would go unnoticed.
Class Notes- Tuesday 09/29
Reminders
1. Before class begins, log onto OpenLab site (& open anything else-digital or print you need for day’s class)
2. Class notes should be thorough (not just vocabulary and what is written on the board) and should be posted by the night of the class
Carroll, Chapter 7: Writing for Blogs
debate: blogger vs. journalist (general interest vs. servicing the public)
Can good quality of blogging be achieved?
When everyone is able to blog, how credible is that idea?
Anyone can blog however, it is only effective when it is understood by the audience “targeted serendipity”
What are the attributes of a great blogger?
Permalink– permanent links
Attribute– defining characteristic
Blogosphere– realm of blogging
Explicit– stated clearly and in detail, leaving no room for confusion or doubt
Hierarchy– an ordering in which things are placed
Folksonomy– crowd-sourced classification system, user generated way of classifying things (tagging is a folksonomy)
Anonymous– without a name
Eponymous– to be named after
Curate– filtering and organizing information
Idiosyncratic– your own personal way of doing something; individual
- Tagging produces aggregating content through shared interests
- Tagging is like a search engine
- Tagging is used to “sell’ content
- Hashtags are a form of tagging, servicing a little bit of a different purpose, to make something visible and to create engagement
- Think of tagging as key words to distill key concepts/components from the reading
Good blogging consists of:
- being ethical; refrain from lying but being responsible
- being subjective; getting across your individual views
*For Thursday, everyone should reread everyone’s introduction and in a brief comment, comment what you gathered out of the key words. Are there any discrepancies? Also, tag all past posts and posts moving forward.
Class Notes (9/25)
*Next week is moving into discussing blogging as a genre
*All readings are in the Carrol book
*Chapter 7 is leading into next week’s discussion
*Will be looking at The Buzz (OpenLab)
*Blogs are back to Monday night deadline
Discourse Community
Have own language, rules, norms (standards)
There is a social and cultural aspect
A group of people that discuss shared ideas/values
“Wikipedia’s Politics of Exclusion” – Gruwell
Do women prevent themselves in way of gender biases?
Different ways of conceiving truths.
Eliding: to leave out
Interfaces can mask and promote social biases by eliding them
*Contribute to class discussion
Photojournalism
Ethical responsibility
“Social capital” (Carroll 224)
News-> different agendas
Participatory/citizen journalism (Carroll 213)
Hyperlocal news (Carroll 229)
Realities of photojournalism:
*Reliability
*Speed
*Ability to trace
*Portability
*Digital nature
Blogging vs. Journalism
“Is anyone with a blog a journalist? Is anyone with a camera a photographer? What happens to journalism when every reader can also be a writer, editor, and producer? These are but some of the questions long debated in both the blogosphere and in journalism, and still no clear concensus has emerged.” -Brian Carroll
Carroll poses a great question for his readers to ponder upon and there are multiple interpretations that can be made to answer without a clear-cut “answer”, making it right nor wrong. My understanding of journalism is the gathering, processing, and circulation of news, and information that correlates to news to an audience. Unlike journalism, I believe blogging originally, began as a medium to express oneself through thoughts. Essentially, it began through writing (via journals/diaries) but as technological advancements continued to make strides in society, blogging became available to take place digitally and publicly on the internet. Both mechanisms of writing and producing content for an audience is writing out loud so to speak but the moral compass is entirely different.
For bloggers, the deadline for content is always instant. It entails more free-will, more accident-prone, more alive, and less formal. Journalism consists of truthfulness, accuracy, objectivity, impartiality, fairness and public accountability which is undoubtedly easier said than done. In order to provide newsworthy content, these attributions must be considered first. Therefore, bloggers who consider themselves journalists cannot sit on their computers all day but they have to go out and interview sources, investigate, and then explain what they’ve understood from all the information gathered. I digress that opinion is not journalism.
The question of whether anyone with a blog is a journalist I think, has been blurred by time to an extent. Blogging has broadened the digital space of ideas by allowing a multiplicity of individuals’ voices to enter discourse communities: blogging and journalism are two very distinct entities. Much of the blogging world has little interest in what you can call proper journalism. A large proportion of the blogosphere is still dominated by opinion-based writing.
People can argue that journalists claim to be the only useful writers found because people want the hard facts but what people also want is prospective along with the facts. Blogging may well be a step along the road to becoming a journalist. By choosing to write on things that bloggers are passionate about such as beauty, fashion, or food. If a blog gets a ton of hits with thousands of followers, it is without a doubt taken seriously. For instance, one of the biggest fashion blogs out there is Fashionbombdaily.com, where viewers can find the latest on multicultural fashion with nearly 2.4 million visitors. Blogging can be said to equal to journalism with the addition of opinion. Because of the quality of the site’s coverage, their following continues to strengthen thereby encouraging readers to look to the site for takes on fashion news and stories, along with magazine coverage, fashion show reviews, trends, wardrobe advice, celebrity looks for less, and tips on how to break into the industry from the best in the business. The woman behind the site, Claire Sulmers clearly tracks down sources, does investigative reporting, and presents the facts clearly and fairly, she is a journalist with an outstanding blog. Like Josh Micah Marshall’s “The Telling Points Memo”, Fashion Bomb Daily paved the way for “blogging as journalism, or at least established that blogging and the mission of journalism are not necessarily at odds or in any way mutually exclusive” (Carroll 175).
I can’t stand blogs about anything but curly hair… Does that make me weird?
“The best blogs create for their readers a sort of ‘targeted serendipity,’ … or a shared point of view and information and sources a reader perhaps did not know he or she wanted to read.” (Carroll 175) As my title may suggest, the blogs that hold anything I might be willing to throw myself into have something to do with big, natural, curly, kinky hair. For those that aren’t to familiar with too many natural hair blogs, I’ll link a few.
http://naptural85.com/
At one point in around 2010, there were very few people that cared to show the beauty of natural hair. As a fifteen year old with a new-found love for my own curls, I would search Google and Youtube. Although the two examples are not traditional blogs, they do follow” the three hallmarks of most good blogs.” (Carroll 179) Whenever I read a new blog the first thing I look for are regularity in posts. Bloggers that only update every so often do nothing to spark my interest.
In Chapter 4, Carroll expands on the best practices in writing on digital media. for example, “An average of 18 items are viewed before the first selection to read is made. The high number means some headlines or images are seen multiple times before a choice is made.” (Carroll 96) There are many rules and regulations to blogging but there is one question that has not been answered: How do you ever get the courage to make your first opinion known?