A Look Back at 2003, and What's on the Horizon for the Online News Universe: 2003 was a tumultuous year for online journalism, including the first "Internet war" and the rise in influence for Weblogs and citizen journalism. We look back at the year that was, and predict what's coming in 2004 [...]
Now a month doesn't go by without another media company announcing new Weblogs -- Fast Company, MSNBC.com, Variety.com, Wired magazine, New York magazine. Whether blogs are journalism or not, journalists are paying attention to them more than ever, writing about bloggers in Iraq or new blogging services offered by AOL.
But 2003 offered up much more than just an unhealthy fascination with blogs. We also obsessed over the proliferation of people with camera phones breaking spot news stories; the rise of Google and Google News; the soap opera at (AOL) Time Warner; the continued inroads of paid content; RSS feeds; massive online coverage of the war in Iraq; viruses, worms and spam overwhelming newsrooms; the struggle for independent news in Zimbabwe, China, Iran and Iraq; and political rhetoric and election coverage.
