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« Early Warning System | Main | Much Ado About Nothing » March 7, 2005Why Do We Need Blogs?Washington Square News, a student newspaper at New York University, notes that when the MSM writes about blogs, they neither ask nor answer a very key question about blogs: Why do we need them? ...What do we need blogs for in the first place? The answer lies in a mainstream media plagued by superficiality, over-polarization of important issues, restrictive selectivity of story coverage and consolidation of outlets. It is notable that in their coverage of blogs, conventional media makes no mention of why exactly blogs are needed. CAS junior Neil Shah put it more bluntly, calling media coverage of blogs "a waste of time." The conventional media likes to mask the horrors of the disease by discussing the wonders of the cure, but while blogs do their part to alleviate media's harms, their own deficiencies are clearly palpable.It's a nice bit of rhetorical jujitsu - and, yes, the MSM does tend to gloss over an embarrassing root cause of the explosion of the blogosphere (namely, it's own failures) - but the reality is that even if the news media was doing its job incredibly well and without bias, error or ethical malfeasance, blogs would still be a needed and valuable addition to the information stream. In collegiate terms, the MSM is the lecture, blogs are the conversation in the hallways afterward. Somehow, I don't think students at NYU only discuss the lecture if the speaker was lousy. Posted in Blogging & Journalism
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