The age of magnificent news firms and the realm of heavy, solemn presses is seemingly over. The symptom that is most frequently referred to when considering the decay of journalism is the unselected avalanche of free news that is available to everyone. Newspaper companies cannot anymore monopolize the sources of news or determine what the audience should be interested in. During the history of journalism (up until now), the daily newspaper served its purpose: deliver a certain amount of selected news and reports from around the world to everyone willing to pay for it. Today, the channels of streaming news are free and open due to blogs, free online broadcasts, homepages of freelance journalists and so on.
Still, news articles covering certain topics are much easier to compile in newspapers. Similarly, some other types of news will appear to be more efficient in published by bloggers. According to my experience, there is still a wide gap between blogs and the articles of professional journalists. The most outstanding difference would be the stamp of personality in the articles of web logs and the common third-person style formality of professional journalists. A piece of news the reader can relate to personally will convey its message more effectively than a formal article in any traditional newspaper. Blogs gain audience by featuring a personal style and delivering certain types of news within a narrowed topic: such is the case of travel blogs, par example.
Considering the relationship between blogs/freelance news forums and traditional news firms, blogs will not necessarily replace the traditional news format in its entirety. Instead, blogs simply satisfy the needs of an audience that seek a more “natural” means of acquiring news. A blog revokes the scene of somebody kindly and enthusiastically telling somebody about what happened lately. Such form of telling news may even resemble gossiping, but a blogger also has to maintain her creditability. But who said gossiping was an anomaly of communication? Gossips are stories, no matter how private; they are the stories we talk about and the stories we can’t live without.
Blaming bloggers for their personal style manipulating or even distorting news is somewhat one-sided, especially considering the subtle ways a traditional article is able to do the same with a short, 1-column-long, boring little article by “carefully trimming” even the tiniest bits off in order to fit the blank space on the paper. A blogger at least allows free and direct channels for feedback. Moreover, considering reader’s response, for many readers, an uncensored and constantly refreshed comment page is more reassuring than a carefully selected compilation of letters to the editor that appears in a meticulously separated section of a newspaper.
