What makes a blog by a citizen journalist catch the public eye? Upon reading Chapter 7 in Oreilly’s “We the Media,” I took notice when describing how Rex Hammock blogged about his meeting with George W. Bush. This was closed for the press, but Hammock took it upon himself to describe his impression of the President on his blog. Now this is what I call news coverage! It’s deep inside of us, this burning desire to uncover the truth. Not everyone has the opportunity to meet the President long enough to form an accurate depiction of his persona, which makes this story quite intriguing.
‘“He is definitely not a wonk, but he knows clearly what he believes needs to happen for the country and its economy to prosper,” Hammock wrote of Bush’ (Oreilly 138).
Hammock was not a credentialed reporter, but a citizen journalist reporting what was new in his life. For some bloggers – their whole lives are newsworthy. Imagine how much attention an uncensored blog journal of the Dalai Lama would get.
What I didn’t realize, before Chapter 6 in “Dispatches from Blogistan,” was that citizen journalism was around long before blogging. In the 1960s there was a huge emergence of citizen journalists who started up local newspapers and off-beat print media. It’s like we’ve been dieing to blog for ages but now we are finally given the technology to do so. I find the medium of blogging to be a gift for society. Zeyad, the author of the Healing Iraq blog wrote a full account of what it was like to live in Iraq in a time of war. In America, on the opposite end of things, we are given the gift to see what it’s like on the other side of the war, the side we would otherwise be ignorant about. The mainstream media is very limiting in what we can know about the war. Sure, we had 24/7 footage in the “green zone,” but we long for the raw material that we know is beneath the camera’s lens. Having access to this kind of information will educate us in making decisions for ourselves, rather than having the media make them for us. Knowing what our soldiers are really doing, for better or for worse, would make us all better citizens.
Now that’s what I call news.
Things to Ask:
If mainstream media covered the War on Iraq to the extent of uncensored bloggers, how might this change public opinion?
What makes a blog by a citizen journalist catch the public eye?
