Blogging and Journalism: A New, Questionable Frontier

This marks August Skamenca's first blog entry. After questioning the relevancy of the cyber-phenomena he decided to embark on his own quest to get a better understanding of the allure of the blog.

Ask anyone in my field if blogging is journalism and the hard and fast answer is “no.” As I type this Microsoft Word even tells me blogging is not accepted as a word, as evidenced by correction red beneath the word itself. Blogger (and bloggers) are not recognized by Word either.

Wondering if I just have an outdated version of Word, I made a quick check of dictionary.com. It [blogger] is there, along with blog…blogging is not. Though it does turn up as a noun under blog.

While linguists may be slow to catch on, others have not been. Look online and the cyber-community is exploding with hundreds, probably thousands of new bloggers everyday. Blogging has become a sub-culture of the Internet community. But again, is it journalism? In some cases. Journalists do blog.

NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams has his “Daily Nightly.” The folks over at CBS have “Public Eye,” an ombudsman’s site of sorts, frequently turning a critical eye on its own news broadcasts.

Now, this journalist has taken of leap of blind faith. I’m going to blog. Sure the word seems foreign to my vocabulary, but why not? How long will I do it? I don’t know. Will I like it? I don’t know. Whatever the outcome, blogging is a new frontier. Giddyup.

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