With some inner discomfort at joining a herd, any herd, I have decided that I would be doing my readers a disservice if I did not link to the MAJOR blogging tome in today's The New York Times Sunday Magazine. So, without much comment on that blogging bouquet, here is the link (an rss userland link that won't go away, or so Dave Winer says):
However, there is another blogging article I would like to send you to. I have been meaning to put it up for almost two weeks but other deadlines kept me otherwise occupied. It is from the Poynter Institute's website, Poynter Online, which I have written about and linked to previously. The column I want to send you to today is from the POYNTER ETHICS JOURNAL and is titled: "Journalism in the Age of Blogs." It is written by Kelly McBride, a seasoned journalist now a resident Ethics faculty member of the Poynter Insitute in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Some parts of the column are dated due to the CBS scandal's wide and rapid coverage. But most of it is important reading for all bloggers and readers of blogs. Poynter Online is a free registration site for journalists, but most of their seminars are not free. I believe it is worth your effort to go there and register. Therefore, I will post only the lead graphs and hope you choose to click through:
Turbulence in the blogospherewill continue to affect mainstream journalism for the foreseeable future. Wind and rain, harsh criticism and second-guessing will remain part of the weather system influencing newsrooms throughout the country.
Get used to it.
Then figure out how to deal with it. ...
We journalists are no longer the gatekeepers in the marketplace of ideas. The doors have been flung wide open by the egalitarian nature of the Internet and when you look at the big picture you see -- chaos. You see a medium in its infancy, howling and kicking against the limitations of the world into which it was born.
The surplus of stories about the blogosphere reflects an attempt to explain and gauge this creature to ourselves, as well as to the many readers and viewers who don't participate and perhaps aren't even aware of the cacophony of commentary and criticism.
