A4- Part 1- Blogging - response

Dana Hull’s (2006) article Blogging Between the Lines offers up a snapshot of the early days of blogging. Written almost ten years ago, it comes across as rather dated. Back then blogging was a total new frontier. As Hull points out, traditional news outlets struggled with the amount of control they should exert over bloggers.

Anyone could create a blog and write anything they wanted. There were not any standards unless you actually wrote something libelous. Newspapers who hired bloggers really struggled with when and how to step in. If they edited the content too much then how would it be different from a traditional article just written a bit more informally?

While bloggers do still exist, much of it as evolved into social media. The article references several Myspace “blog” posts which we would now categorize under social media rather than blogs. Now everyone wants information immediately and people are eager to share. Instead of news outlets hiring bloggers, they republish tweets and Facebook posts. Is this better or worse? Most of the time they are not getting permission or compensating the content creator and information is not fact checked like it should be. Traditional news outlets are cutting down on staff as they have trouble competing with the instant world of social media. The days of hiring outside bloggers is long over but is this really better?

Citation: Hull, D. (2006). Blogging between the lines. American Journalism Review, 28(6), 62-67