Traditional Media vs Blogging: The Quest for Quality

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The advent of digital age has equipped everyone who has access to internet with a powerful tool to make his voice heard via a variety of Web 2.0 platforms, may it be social networking site, blog or video/photo sharing network. Blogging, in particular, has turned the table for news production which used to be a privileged profession for a number of traditional journalists but now has become the playground for numerous yet mushrooming bloggers, also known as citizen journalists. It is also worth noting that with the growing popularity of blogging as an alternative platform for delivering news and commentary, most journalists from conventional media have started to set up blogs either outside or within their news network so that they are able to communicate with readers on topical issues from a more personal perspective.

This essay aims to break the myth that the rise of citizen journalists is reducing the need for traditional ‘quality’ journalism. I will firstly invite a debate over several drawbacks of traditional media where citizen journalists can fill in the gap, then deal with the problematic conceptualization of blogging as a replacement for traditional media in the quest for quality journalism, and finally include my working definition of quality journalism. In this essay, I will focus on the nature of “blogging” and “citizen journalism” as news media so both terms are interchangeable.

1 Why blog instead of traditional media

Traditional media business proves financially and institutionally vulnerable, which may translate into poor execution in terms of accuracy and objectivity. Commercial news corporations heavily depend on avenue from advertising though many online news cites such as the Financial Times and the Wal...

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