April 29, 2005

Off The Sidelines

Sidelines, the student newspaper at Middle Tennessee State University, has an excellent advance story today on the BlogNashville conference. The site requires registration, but it's free. The story mentions that a member of the journalism faculty at MTSU, digital media professor Jennifer Bailey Woodard, is attending the conference and that she hopes to learn more about blogging that would help her incorporate blogs and blogging into the journalism curriculum.Woodard says she hopes to gather information at the conference that will determine if blogging will become part of the curriculum at MTSU, possibly as part of courses offered as early as this fall.

"We want to teach mobile media - where a reporter is using a laptop, a
cell phone, a digital camera, reporting live from the scene," Woodard
says. "We also want to plan an Internet magazine coalition, do a
variety of things, including publishing a Web newspaper. Blogging
could be part of that. We are not that heavily into blogging here yet.
That's what we hope to learn."Here's an additional excerpt from the Sidelines story...

The effects of blogs on journalism and the mainstream media are among the topics Woodard said she hopes to learn more about at the conference.

"Blogging is such an individual undertaking, and some blogs are certainly more credible than others," Woodard says. "Internet blogging is so wonderful and yet so strange. It opens up the media to the world, but adds more credibility problems. But it does allow those who never had a voice to have one."

Hobbs said that the instantaneous nature of the Internet helps to keep bloggers accountable for what they publish.

"Blogs have a self-correcting dynamic," Hobbs says. "If I publish something factually inaccurate on a blog, it will be pointed out immediately by other bloggers, and because it happens in real-time, errors are often corrected right on the blog."

Among the topics scheduled during the conference is legal protection for bloggers and using the Internet and blogs as research tools for journalists.

Hobbs said the legal session will discuss what legal protections bloggers can expect under the First Amendment and what standards should be followed to avoid slander and libel lawsuits.

"This is a new area of law. We don't really know if bloggers are covered by the same legal protections as journalists," Hobbs says. "Can bloggers protect their sources?"

Hobbs said the session on computer-assisted reporting and research, often called CARR, is intended to help journalists use the Internet for research and fact-checking.

Mark Tapscott, a conservative journalist and director of media relations for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank, will lead the session along with a representative from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a policy watchdog group for the middle to low-income families and individuals.

"Tapscott pioneered this type of training using the Internet and database to improve reporting," Hobbs says, "but we didn't want to appear partisan, so we made sure that we had representation from a more liberal group like the CBPP as well."

Also coming: Blogging pioneer Dave Winer, who originated the "BloggerCon" conference that BlogNashville is modeled after. Winer is not only a big-time Howard Dean fan, he's brilliant and a true pioneer of blogging. Winer writes the ScriptingNews blog and was instrumental in convincing the New York Times to make it possible for bloggers to access their archives for free via RSS feeds.

On his blog, Winer recently wrote this about his participation in BlogNashville: "I'll lead a discussion on a topic near to my heart. How can we work together in the USA even when we disagree. Nashville's a good place for that, and I'm a southern boy these days, but still have my blue state values."
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That's what BlogNashville is all about - building a better blogosphere for all bloggers, not just liberal or conservative bloggers, in order to help build a better country and a better world. Come, join the conversation.

P.S. May 2 is Winer's birthday. Happy Birthday, Dave.