BloggingJOUR 4430

Friday 16th November 2007

Content

1. What is Blogging?

2. DailyKos the Community-Blog

3. Blogging at War

What is Blogging?by Sabina Ticevic

What is blogging?

A publishing system for personal websites

Publish your thoughts, meanings, pictures and reflections

Considered as a public diary

But also: Blogs comment on news or political issues

What is blogging?

A typical blog combines text, images and links to other blogs, media or texts related to the issue discussed in the blog.

Blogging can be seen as

1) participatory journalism or

2) citizen journalism

The positive effects

Enhances freedom of speech- anyone can create their own blog

Citizens from suppressed regimes are given a chance to show the real side of the story

Another point of view than the mainstream media

The problems

Releasing confidential information

Being biased

Easily create hate-speech

Can be used as a propaganda-tool

Employees who reveal information and then loose their job

Bloggers can be anonymous

DailyKos the Community-Blog

by Alex Bräuer

What is a Community-Blog?

A Community-Blog is

a normal Blog with a FrontPage and a group of people who write Diaries, which will be posted in sequence.

Everyone can be member and write diaries. You can see the headline of them in a list on the right side of the Homepage.

You can click on the headline, read the hole entry and can comment on it. If you like the entry, you can recommend the diary.

The diary with a lot of positive ratings has the opportunity to get on the Recommended-list, which is even more visible on the homepage.

A Community-Blog is a special kind ofblog, because everyone has theopportunity to be part of it in order topublicize his/her views.

There are a couple of famous politicalCommunity-Blogs like Mydd, BoomanTribune, Calitics, Red State, EuropeanTribune.

What is DailyKos?

The most famous political CommunityBlog in the US, because of

Around 500 000 visits per day

Famous people from politics writing on Daily Kos like former President Jimmy Carter

Visibility in the mass media. The founder of Daily Kos, Markos Moulitsas Zùniga, was on nearly every political television show like NBC „Meet the Press“, MSNBC „Countdown“, and CNN „Reliable Sources“.

„This is a Democratic blog, a partisanblog. One that recognizes thatDemocrats run from the left to right onthe ideological spectrum, and yetwe’re all still in this fight together. [...]Liberal? Yeah, we’re around here andwe’re proud. But it’s not a liberal blog.It’s a Democratic blog with one goal inmind: electoral victory. And since wehaven’t gotten any of that from the currentcrew, we’re one more thing: a reform blog.The battle for the party is not anideological battle. It’s one betweenestablishment and anti-establishmentfactions. And as I’ve said a million times,the status quo is untenable.”

Why is this important for freedom of expression?

Every issue can be discussed by everyone in the public sphere of DailyKos.

Politics and DailyKos – Exchange beyond the two systems

Globalizes public sphere through DailyKos

Is it really so good?

Bill O’Reilly about DailyKos

Blogging at War

by Judith Martin, Gisela Torrenti

Examples of blogging

Example 1: Kevin Sites (http://kevinsites.net/2003_03_16_archive.html)

This blog was written by a journalist from the NBC News.

He was a freelance solo journalist on assignment for NBC News in Asia.

He began to writte this blog as a personal website not affiliated with or funded by NBC News.

This website acts like a parallel and independent source of information from the NBC News.

Example 1: Kevin Sites

CNN “politely” asked him to stop blogging and they did immediately and completely because “he felt it was his obligation to do so”.

Although he felt the blog was a separate and independent journalistic enterprise, they did not.

For this reason, Kevin was forced to stop writting on his war blogging for a while.

7 months later, Sites came back to Iraq but this time on-assignment with MSNBC.

Example 1: Kevin Sites

- He continued writting his warblog because NBC agreed with it:

“MSNBC has also agreed to allow me to continue with my PERSONAL and may I stress, NON-AFFILIATED weblog”.

- But there are some stipulations. The most important is that Sites has to send to NBC News the information before publish it in order to be revised by the channel.

Examples of blogging

Example 2: Joshua Kucera

- Blog writed by a freelance journalist who has extensively covered Iraqi Kurdistan.

- He works for the news magazine “Time”.

- He only writes on his personal blog during 10 days because as he said:

“My editors have demanded that I stop posting to this site until the war ends. And they pay the bills, so what can I do. Thanks everyone for reading, and I hope to be back here soon.”

Example 2: Joshua Kucera

- This is another example of the limitations on freedom of expression in the special case of blogging.

“Somehow to my more recent visitors I have become a symbol of the independent voice being stamped out by the corporate media.” Joshua Kucera

Conclusion

- To sum up, we can say that the restrictions on Freedom of Expression are 6: blasphemy, obscenity, indecency offences, racial hatred, national security and criminal defamation.

- But on the other hand, we can say that in those cases the excesive liberty does not guarantee the periodistic rigor.

- These warblogs can turn on potentially compromising sources of information.