Tuesday, April 06, 2010

Bloggers think of themselves as journalists

Not only is the delivery of news and information changing quickly (iPad, we're talking about you) but so is the view of what constitutes journalism. A recent survey by PRNewswire in the U.S. (according to a story on Fast Company's site) notes that 52% of bloggers refer to themselves as journalists. The research was a survey of 1,500 "traditional and non-traditional" media sources. 
The article notes that some of this may be the result of "semantic drift" -- that is, people redefining the meaning of the word "journalism". But even more interesting is that 91% of bloggers use other blogs at least sometimes for story research, but only 38% use magazines and 35% newspapers.
As Fast Company points out, new technologies allow users to switch from blogs, magazine websites and device-specific apps so easily that the distinctions among them become essentially irrelevant.
[thanks, Alison]

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2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

It kind of is journalism, in the most literal sense: people writing stuff in a journal. Maybe we need a new word for what we do.

7:31 pm  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Bloggers calling themselves journalists is the scariest thing our industry can imagine. Journalists can be bloggers but bloggers can never be journalists. This is almost as bad as Redwood, I mean Totem, coining the term "marketing journalist."

12:22 pm  

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