25 fevereiro 2003

VITAMEDIAS
Blogging comes to Harvard: America's oldest university has hopped on the Internet's hottest new trend, hiring software developer Dave Winer to help get students and faculty blogging.
Q - What impact has the blog had on the way information is shared, particularly with respect to journalism?
A - In some areas, like tech reporting, the Web logs have largely replaced the professionals.
Q - Hey, wait a minute.
A - News.com might be the exception. Think about what the landscape looked like five or 10 years ago, with just a handful of publications instead of a whole industry. People now get the information from each other and for each other using Web logs. There are still professional journalists writing, but a lot less. Web logs are journalism. Have they had a big impact? Absolutely. When a big story hits, I don't necessarily trust the professional journalists to tell me what's going on. If I can get the Web logs from the people who were actually involved, I'll take that.
A really remarkable thing came out from the BBC, where they asked amateur photographers to send them pictures. So they're jumping onto the trend that's going to grow and grow and grow. With the Columbia disaster, where did the pictures come from? Not from professional journalists.
Q - So you're saying that professional journalists don't provide any value, any context, any background that helps make sense of the news?
A - The typical news article consists of quotes from interviews and a little bit of connective stuff and some facts, or whatever. Mostly it's quotes from people. If I can get the quotes with no middleman in between--what exactly did CNN add to all the pictures? Maybe they earned their salaries a little bit, but Web logs have become journalism, and it's much richer. Journalism is a high calling, but it's really no more than points of view on what's taking place. I think the pros are going to use this tech, and they are doing it more and more.