Saturday, September 22, 2007

Ezines & Blogs: New Forms of Journalism

A couple of weeks ago I had no idea what a blog or ezine was. I had heard of them, but really paid no attention. I am know writing my own blog, and I have to say it is really fun. As silly as it seems regular folks now have the option to write there own journalistic pieces and submit those pieces for everybody in the world to see. The printing press enabled writers and political thinkers to have a voice that could be heard from afar. The Internet took it a step further and now allows the entire World to be heard. I will now go into more depth and explore blogs and ezines on the net today.

The ezine I stumbled into was http://www.opendemocracy.net/. I liked this ezine because it reaches the global market. The reason I find this to be so important is simple; it shows how far reaching the Internet is. This ezine can capture readers from all around the globe, not just the US. I found many current issues such as the war in Iraq, global warming, and politics in Europe.

I also found, http://www.bloggossip.com/, which is a blogging sight dedicated to blogs about headline news. This sight offers stories about US news, foreign news, entertainment, and sports. The sight is very well put together and has news about all the current issues in America.

Both opendemocracy.net and bloggossip.com were very easy to find on the Google search engine. I had no trouble at all finding these two useful sights and thought bloggossip.com was the easiest to read. Blogggossip.com had many bright pictures on the home page which attracted me to the web sight. The sight was very well formated and easy to navigate. Opendemocracy.net appeared to be a bit more credible. All of the stories on this sight were headline stories. One difference between the ezine headline stories and the blog headline stories were that the blog headline stories were geared toward entertainment. It seems as though entertainment is a classic form of headlining here in America, whereas in the global market, headlining is focused on serious issues, such as global warming.

Surprisingly enough both web sights, including the blog sight, seemed to be quite credible. I am still pretty old fashioned when it comes to were I get my news. For right now I think I will still get my news from the local news stations and the paper, but the ezine idea is growing on me. I can see myself trying to find more web sights like globaldemocracy.net. I don't believe a newspaper is more credible, but I still have to adjust to the new technology. As analyzers and readers of the media we must read and decipher what is true and untrue. I am starting to realize that liers come from all over. Integrity can be lost at a magazine, TV station, newspaper, or even a blog or ezine. Integrity can still be lost with an editorial staff, but that is a risk I am willing to take for "now". "Now" seems to be getting shorter and shorter the more I research on the topic of blogs and ezines.

I believe this research strongly supports my thesis statement. Blogs and now ezines are becoming extremely prevalent. The media world is being flipped upside down as new technology is being introduced to our society.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

hi vincent,

thanks for your nice comments about opendemocracy.net (i am editor-in-chief)

i'd be interested to know how you got your sense of the site's "credibility". of course, we work very hard to maintain credibility, but it is a really hard one to get right, out of the box...

tony

Vincent Titiriga said...

Tony,

No problem. Like I said in my blog, I think it is imortant for readers to maintain integrity as well. I read a lot of news. Your articles were very well written and well cited. I really enjoyed opendemocracy.net. Keep up the good work.

Vincent