April 28, 2003
Weblogging on PBS Newshour
"People who do things on the Internet" -Jim Lehrer, PBS Newshour referring to the weblogging phenomena.
(I'm sorry, I just really like that quote for some reason.)
On tonight's edition of the PBS Newshour, there was a fairly long examination about the popularity of weblogging. In my opinion the story was pretty good. It introduced a group of everyday bloggers in the DC area (all four were men, and for some inexplicably dumb reason, their blog's addresses were not revealed). The piece also discussed the major players in the blogosphere, including Instapundit, Andrew Sullivan, Back to Iraq 2.0, Rantburg, Where is Raed and of course The Command Post (w00t!).
The emphasis of the piece centered upon the influence of blogs upon journalism and current events. The interviewer spent a good amount of time discussing Joshua Micah Marshall and his effect on the the Trent Lott debacle. In addition, the interactive nature of blogging was featured, by a little interlude between Mr. Marshall and a fan of his. (Also, Mr. Marshall apparently looks better in his blog pic than on tape. Ahem.)
To provide the bigger picture, a woman named Joan Connell from MSNBC was interviewed, and her role was to give some analysis about the weblogging phenomenon. Her major statement of the evening was "Weblogging is not journalism because there is not an editor between the author and the reader".
(Uh, ok. I disagree with her about that because I believe that the blogosphere is ultimately self correcting because of the inherent communicative nature of the medium. Here we have commenting, email and trackbacking between blogs to debate and refute points others have made.)
Some quibbles just in general...
- No mention of the effect of a blogger's political affiliation or apparent biases.
- Where were the female bloggers?
Still, I think this was a much better treatment of the topic than, say, what I'd expect on CBS Evening News. However, I still don't think my Mom would still understand what I am doing.
Update: Here is the reaction from Instapundit. He also thought the piece was pretty good. And the woman from MSNBC whose name I didn't catch originally was Joan Connell.
Update 2: Micah Alpern comments.
Update 3: Lago trackbacked me, which is a form of intra-blog communication. So is email. ;-P