SERIOUS: How Blogs are Changing Journalism, AAJA Mini-Conference Panel, 3/25/06

I went to a couple of great panels at the Asian American Journalist's Association mini-conference held this Saturday at the NYU Silver Center, just off Washington Square East. The first panel, entitled "How Blogs are Changing Journalism" featured panelists Jeff Yang of SFGate.com, Choire Sicha, formerly of gawker.com and now a Senior Editor at the New York Observer, and Derek Rose, of the NY Daily News. How *is* blogging changing journalism, the moderator asked:

Depends on how you define journalism, said Yang, who also puts out a biweekly email blog called InstantYang, about Asian Pop Culture and Issues (to which I immediately subscribed). Blogging isn't usually investigative or muckraking in the traditional sense, but is rather characterized by three main components:

* Aggregation. Bloggers link to links that link to other links. If you trace the trail all the way back to the "beginning", you might find that there's no source other than a blogger with a big mouth and a small opinion. But people aren't reading blogs for hard news. They're reading them because they bloggers do a good job of the next component...

* Filtration. There's SO much crap on the internet now -- as I said in my very first post to this blog, analysts estimte that 75,000+ blogs are started per day -- how can you know where to start? Well, that's a blogger's job, to weed out interesting facts, links and other tidbits that their readers might find worthwhile. Where do you find these blogs? Ask friends, go to Technorati.com, or blogebrity.com. Type in keywords (or what bloggers will call "tags"). You'll find something.

And finally, blogs involve themselves in...
* Giving a slant to news. You're reading my blog, presumably, because you care what I have to say about the things I choose to talk about. Of course, I'm not going to choose things that aren't interesting to me. There are more authoritative blogs for news and gossip, numerous blogs about New York news (like gawker.com" and gothamist.com), certainly more frequently updated blogs...this is just a little blog for me to write, and for you to read.

Blogs, he said, are ultimately about the Informed Reader, but much, much less about the Informed Writer. I think this is a really interesting and fundamental evolution in the way we are consuming information. Blogs are about choice -- choosing what to write, choosing what to read and bookmark, choosing who you link to, and who you leave out.

NYU Silver Center photo taken from http://www.pbase.com/hjsteed/image/39315190.
Jeff Yang photo taken from www.en.utexas.edu.