The blogging phenomenon

This activity that I’m currently producing is unbelievably and remarkably revolutionary. If I told someone five years ago that blogs would be influencing our culture as much as people like Mahatma Gandhi, Che Guevara and James Joyce did, my mental state would most likely have been questioned. But alas, we’re not just living in the 21st century, we’re immersed in an information age where news can be accessed in a number of seconds and every body is a potential journalist.
The Pew Centre has found in mid 2005 “about 8 million Americans had created blogs and 32 million read them”. So, what exactly does this four letter word mean? The term blog is an “amalgam of web and log”. Blogging is a relatively new, but extremely rapid moving part of the ‘new news’ cycle that is developing more and more each day.

The concept of ‘citizen journalism’ has also emerged out of this ‘new news cycle’. With easy access to multi media technology and the internet people are becoming providers for a great deal of news coverage. The unfortunate event of the 7, July 2005 London bombings has been dubbed the catalyst for citizen reporting. The BBC’s director of news said that “within an hour of the first blast her London newsrooms received 50 emails with pictures and video clips attached”.

And why shouldn’t media consumers contribute to news content? Without a demand for the most detailed and immediate information there would certainly be no supply!

Source: Quinn, S. & Quinn-Allan, D. 2006, ‘User-generated content and the changing news cycle’, in Australian Journalism Review, vol. 28, no.1.