Following Think Progress and Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish, in addition to reading the New York Times, brings up a few things to consider in response to the question of how they fit in to a new news model. One important point to bring up is that the newspaper is largely the first presentation of the news. It is the slightly-less-filtered news source from which many bloggers probably read up on the topics about which they blog. Conversely, to the question of how often a newspaper bases its information on information first posted in blogs, the answer would almost definitely have to be, modestly, significantly less-frequently.
Perhaps it is just my ill-educated guess, but I would assume that newspaper information-gathering requires much more work and time, often utilizing sources closer to the authority of a primary source than a blogger might use. After all, entire buildings full of people work together in an extremely structured way to discover the newest news and put it together, whereas a blogger is often just one guy reading what he has around him (the newspaper, fellow bloggers, as many news websites as he feels like reading).
Though both newspapers and blogs often contain writing from many different authors, newspapers tend to be far more unified in style from one author to the next than blogs. For example, Andrew Sullivan’s blog offers many contributing blogger posts, but they tend to present information in variable and seemingly-improvised ways. Newspapers, on the other hand, usually make their presentation through short paragraphs—many only a sentence or two in length—and consistently provide a background city as the first word after the title to help set the scene.
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Good post, Chris, especially at the beginning. Many of the responses to this prompt were more of a general comparison of the Times with the blogs. The beginning of your post here focuses more on their relationship, which is what I hoped to see. The only thing that would have made this post better would have been specific examples in connection to the blogs you're following.
ReplyDeleteI think it is interesting to consider what comes first- news in the newspaper or news in blogs. It reminds me of the question: What came first-the chicken or the egg? Especially after the discussion in class today about the Fox News. The story about the elementary schools that sang about Obama is a prime example. The video circulated the web, ended up on the Drudge Report, then worked its way into the newsroom. I think that every story circulates somewhat differently. Your post was very concise. I enjoyed reading it.
ReplyDeleteI would agree that the newspaper's search for information is probably more time consuming simply because of the mass of people required to find all the news stories covered in a newspaper. While a blogger can simply cover just one topic and usually doesn't have a team of researchers or reporters helping him/her find the facts that a blogger would need.
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