Blogging

1. Blogging JOUR 4430 Friday 16th November 2007

2. Content • What is Blogging? • DailyKos the Community-Blog • Blogging at War

3. What is Blogging? by Sabina Ticevic

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. DailyKos the Community-Blog by Alex Bräuer

9. 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 of blog, because everyone has the opportunity to be part of it in order to publicize his/her views. There are a couple of famous political Community-Blogs like Mydd, Booman Tribune, Calitics, Red State, European Tribune. What is a Community-Blog?

10. The most famous political Community Blog 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 partisan blog. One that recognizes that Democrats run from the left to right on the ideological spectrum, and yet we’re all still in this fight together. [...] Liberal? Yeah, we’re around here and we’re proud. But it’s not a liberal blog. It’s a Democratic blog with one goal in mind: electoral victory. And since we haven’t gotten any of that from the current crew, we’re one more thing: a reform blog. The battle for the party is not an ideological battle. It’s one between establishment and anti-establishment factions. And as I’ve said a million times, the status quo is untenable.” What is DailyKos?

11. 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

12. Is it really so good? Bill O’Reilly about DailyKos

13. Blogging at War by Judith Martin, Gisela Torrenti

14. 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.

16. 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.

17. 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.

18. 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.”

19. 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

20. 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.