A few days ago, Jay Rosen wrote an interesting piece of opinion concerning the role of blogging as a tool for democratic dialog and also as a factor that changes the way journalism is done. He emphasizes that the technological shift of many-to-many communication triggered by the blog, as a web 2.0 product, is not yet accompanied by a shift in the mentality of journalism professionals. The great majority of these professionals are still seeing their readers as an audience, with a status perceived as not being equal to the status of a ‘licensed’ journalist, which has bad consequences for cooperation on stories. People who are not educated journalists seem to contribute greatly to or with a story at times. And that’s why professionals should reconsider their relation with an active audience.

Rosen illustrates with case studies different aspects of this situation. He adopts a somewhat neutral position, giving voice to both pros and cons. Also, although he believes in the democratic potential of blogging, he doesn’t celebrate just yet, considering there’s still a long way towards noticeable results.

Commenting on Rosen’s article, Robert K. Blechman adds a few interesting observations, among which there are three that I considered to be the most important:

• Blogs will get near the main stream media as complexity, adding sound and pictures, due to bandwidth increase and reduced costs of producing media material ‘at home.’
• This aspect will pose a threat to the way a message is understood, because people tend to be more attentive to the form than to the content of a message. So, audio and video materials are more distractive than textual messages.
• Because a blog is two-way communication, many people can contribute with different facts and opinions to a story. This fact transforms a blog into an open source.

A few days ago, Jay Rosen wrote an interesting piece of opinion concerning the role of blogging as a tool for democratic dialog and also as a factor that changes the way journalism is done. He emphasizes that the technological shift of many-to-many communication triggered by the blog, as a web 2.0 product, is not [...]