J-Topics

If you are teaching a journalism course about blogs, or using blogs,  you may find this list by Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at NYU helpful. It is an initital list of blog postings (with links) that have revealed information that served the public good before the information appeared in the mainstream media. He has invited others to send in other examples to make the list more complete. It is all part of his response to a column in the LATimes about how blogs are useless and unreliable.

In an essay in the Toronto Star, David Eaves and Taylor Owen explore the impact of blogging, which they contend reaches its 10th anniversary this month.

"Blogging continues to be misunderstood by both technophiles and technophobes," they argue, and say blogs will neither replace traditional journalism nor threaten the quality and integrity of journalism – or democracy.

Eaves and Owen say that instead of being a substitute blogs, like books, are symbiotic with journalism, "to the benefit of everyone."

"Ultimately blogs, like books, don't replace journalism; they simply provide another medium for its dissemination and consumption," the pair argue. "If anything, it has made journalism more accurate, democratic and widely read."

Two discussion threads about the VA Tech shootings have emerged at USC's Online Journalism Review, one attached to an entry entitled "Dangers of Citizen Journalism" and another to "VA Tech shooting and grassroots Web journalism."

The shooting incident at Virginia Tech was covered by an army of "citizen journalists" – students filing cellphone photos and video, blog postings, Facebook and MySpace entries and much more to the Internet almost instantaneously, writes Mathew Ingram in today's Globe and Mail.


CNN I-Report front page slideshow