The headline of the news item selected was ‘Bristol uni bosses paid £100k while staff face face losing jobs’, as it appears on the Evening Post (16.03.2010). The online sources selected were mainstream news outlets, since I can’t find any other alternative blog related to the topic, which means that mainstream news outputs, in their both formats, have given a faster coverage to the news item than the so-called ‘citizen journalism’

The online source chosen was This Is Bristol, the on-line output of the Evening Post. Taking as a point of reference the printed news item, it could be said that there are few differences between both versions published by the Evening Post. Most of the information published by This Is Bristol is just a ‘cut and paste’ from its printed version, or viceversa. The main difference is that This Is Bristol gives some additional information (probably because the online output is not so restricted by space limitations). The general tone of the news item is the same and the main issues of the topic are well represented in both outlets.

Conclusions can be drawn easily. Despite the new possibilities that New Journalism offers, mainstream traditional media keep using their online outlets to publish almost the same kind of news, with the same structure and content. In this case, This Is Bristol is just the online replicate of the Evening Post, instead of a different news output. Little or nothing can be found here of the concept of J-blog, and this shows to what extent traditional journalist practice continues to dominate the mainstream outlets.

But not only journalism has changed, also its audiences did. A more engaged active reader is now the main consumer of news through (J-)blogs. The interactiviness that the Internet allows has provided to bloggers a powerful tool to build a community around their sites and, by doing so, achieving an effective and useful journalist authority within its community of readers. Which eventually became followers and critics and supporters at the same time. Due to J-blogs, a New Journalism, together with a  ‘postmodern form of writing’ (in which journalists express their subjective opinions), rose.

However, as Donald Matheson wrote in ‘New Media & Society’ (2004): there is much about the Guardian weblog that is ‘old media’. And that’s true, overall within j-blogs and mainstream media. Despite some changes have been made, for some an improvement or, at least, a progress or evolution, for other this is just hype as its best, a deviance as its worst. In my opinion, and from a pretty Darwinist point of view, some basic notions of journalism will remain, like its watchdog function, while other characteristics will continue morphing and adapting to the current times.  It’s not the end of traditional journalism, but this New Journalism came to stay.

As hyperlocal is not a geographically conditioned term anymore, something can be hyperlocal to my own interests and that’s what I did. Within the huge spectrum of music, I have selected electronic music as a theme topic for my Twitter list. The list includes some online electronic music magazines, record labels, djs and promoters that, after a deep research, seemed to be worthy to follow them. With the material provided through their tweets (around 10 interesting news related tweets per hour) we can get enough information to run our own blog about electronic music.

You can check the results of the integrated list by following this link: Underground Grooves

As an influential report predicted ten years ago, ‘new technologies were set to increase our capacity to interact’ and this capacity ‘would create new ways to configure businesses, organise companies, and serve customer’. Nowadays, the Web 2.0, in which social networks and blogs are based, has become part of the daily life of an enormous part of the population in developed countries. However, this rise, although faster, did not happen all of a sudden.

The first stage can be founded back in 90’s. From 1995 onwards, the emergence message boards, on-line forums and, in general, the sense of on-line community took place. Despite it was nothing in comparison to the social networking we find in our current societies, it could be regarded as the seeds or the modern ancestors of such tools as Facebook or Twitter.

From 2001, the concept of blog has become part of our lives and five years later, in 2006, we started to speak about social networks. This evolution in the ways of communication also affected and, therefore, can also be applied to journalism.  This technology promoted the rise of citizen journalism to that extent that we could say there’s a Fifth State, which is complementary to the traditional news outlets (Nic Newman, 2009).

I would say that in accordance to Newman, as some fears (read more) disappeared in traditional media, well-known traditional news sources as The Guardian or New York Times have started to speak about the great opportunities that networks offer. Social networking and citizen journalism, together with established traditional media, is not the future of journalism but its present. Too optimistic perhaps, but probably the history is repeating…

We can distinguish between two different kinds of hypertextuality: internal and external. According to Oblak, external hypertextuality is ‘a quite unusual feature for all media formats’, although it becomes significant in online-only news. Regarding external hypertextuality, it is more present in traditional news formats and their respective online versions.

It could be argued that this happens in this way because traditional media are more in competition than exclusive online news outputs. Competitiveness can be seen as one of the factors that make of external hypertextuality ‘an unusual feature’. On the other hand, internal hypertextuality is more present, in order to retain the audience as much time as possible reading the website.

Interactivity, on the other hand, has become a way of measuring success. Through feedbacks, the authors or owners are able to measure not only how many people read them but also their opinion about the subjects. Interactivity becomes relevant in order to get the audiences engaged and make them feel part of the process and not just mere spectators or readers. Failing to achieve this will carry negative consequences, as a homogenization of traditional and on-line news and ‘an abandonment of the specific potentials that the Internet offers’, according to Oblak.

Engaging audiences is one of the most powerful tools that the new media provides and the ideal of a interactive communication process in news production still seems to be an unaccomplished tasks for most of news media outputs.

In addition, there are other ways of increasing the audience of blogs. Intertextuality among blogs and other websites works pretty good and, together with RSS feeds, are the oldest but still effective methods to get the more people involved in our content.

As soon as we get people attracted to our blog, the need for knowing better our readers starts. Most of the blogs have methods to analyze the audiences. Measuring and evaluating those analytics become crucial to keep increasing our readership. Through analyses we will be able to see which “kind of people” is interested in our blog: how they found it, how much time they spend on it, where they are from, their age, sex and other interests.

An ideal blog is the one which attracts as much involved readers as possible. Comments and feedbacks are a good way to measure how much readers are involved in our content. However, it’s a fact that most of the people read but do not use to post comments. Because of this, it’s also important to see how much time readers spent on our blog.

In order to exemplify it, I have divided the analysis of my own audience in three periods:

- The first one corresponds to the time the blog was private. This means that no one can get access to the content so, the number of readers is, logically, zero. This period of time goes from the second day of February to the first day of March.

- The second one corresponds to a period of time when the blog was made public but no promotion was made.  The period goes from the 1^st of March to the 13^th of March. During this time, 24 people visited my blog, a little audience, mostly friends and classmates. The total number of visitor during this period

- The third one is the promotional period. This period is shorter than the two previous ones because I want to focus in the different audiences we get by making some promotion. This period goes from 13^th of March to 16^th of March. In 4 days, the blog received 87 visitors who made 4 comments and give some punctuation to the entries.

Finally, the most visited entry was the main page of the blog. That makes sense because all the entries can be read from that main page and users only need to click into a post in order to make some comments.

(Note: This entry has been updated on the 16th of March with the data of the blog audiences provided by wordpress)

Subjective Reporting (according to WikiAnswers): definition

Once we have defined the object of study or what we are looking for, we could start looking for some blogs and see if they differ from traditional news writing, to which extent is the author involved or his possible bias. I have chosen Google, in its blog search, as the tool to find that examples. After a quick search, I found this interesting blog, which deals with the issue of the last earthquake in Chile from a subjective, although very interesting, point of view.

You can check the blog and read the full article here: eatwineblog

I found very interesting the way the author, Liz Caskey, detaches himself from worldwide media:

‘While so much of the worldwide media seems intensely focused on the devastation in Chile, please note that many of these images are from the cities of Constitución, Talca, and Concepcion, over 200 miles south of Santiago’

At the same time, she speaks about the  ‘subjectivity of journalism’:

‘Two days later, damage here is pretty mild (again, the news shows ONLY the trashed buildings, remember journalism is extremely subjective).’

However, the author also involves herself in the reporting when she says:

‘The international press, and even the US Embassy, is not helping by painting a picture that the whole country is an utter catastrophe. This is simply not accurate. Patagonia and the Atacama Desert came away unharmed. Friends vacationing on the beaches near La Serena hardly felt the quake and drove home safely to Santiago as usual. In Puerto Varas and Chiloé, while gas rations help allot precious fuel for emergency vehicles and planes, life is otherwise business as usual. Santiago too…well, you already read about life here! These are the other faces of Chile. While we can hardly forget the situation in the south, I want to contextualize this for you guys. This is one of the longest countries in the world, spanning over 30 latitudes. The affected area is perhaps 1/8 of the whole country.’

To this point, we could say that there’s no real objective reporting, neither in its traditional or its digital form. The best way to find the closest approach to objectivity is by checking different sources, mainstream and independent ones, and find a balance between both to retrieve the more objective information.

The clear bias of the author is about the mass media that are portraying a wrong image of the Chilean situation, according to the author perceptions and interests. We should not forget that the blog belongs to a tourism corporation called: Liz Caskey Culinary & Wine Experiences.

As a conclusion, while the mass media try to portrait the catastrophe because it’s newsworthy, the blogger, in this case Ms. Liz Caskey, is trying to keep tourism going to Chile, not just because Chilean economy depends to a great extent of it, but also her own corporation is based on a tourism economy.

The notion of cultural authority becomes very significant in relation to journalistic professionalism.  According to Starr (1982), this concept can be defined as ‘the power to define and describe reality’. Moreover, ‘cultural authority’ gives journalists the ability not only to decide what is “news”, but also to control and define standards of journalistic practice’ (Zelizer, 1993).

The fundamental challenge that online journalists face nowadays, in relation to traditional media, is professionalism. What defines someone as a professional? Which criteria should be used to define what is professional and what’s not? How can achieve an online journalist the category of professional?

Well, despite a lot of different criteria to define it, it seems more worthy to forget about the medium (traditional or online) and focus in the news. In my opinion, there’s professional journalism both in its digital and traditional forms, it’s not something that depends on the medium but on the way journalists deal with the subject. In the same way, we can find clear examples of non-professional journalist in both media environment.

All this means that professionalism is more related to concepts such as investigative reporting or objectivity. Any critic should focus on these concepts, instead of the medium, since attacking the medium seems to have to do more with biases and a more conservative ideology than with an actual lack of professionalism. One of the reasons for this kind of attacks can be found in the ‘replacement hypothesis’. According to it, new media will replace old media. However, I believe much more in the integration of both media, as it happened in the past with TV or radio, in the sense that the history is repeating again and again.

As it happened to TV news and radio news, Online news can not be understood without a technology that supports it. In this way, online journalism can not be understood without the Internet as its medium and computers as its main tools. To find out which one can be the first ancestor of this way of journalism, we should go back to the end of the 60’s and the beginning of the 70’s. At that time, we can find the first seed of what later became the Internet and online journalism. The first has its roots in the DARPA project, a military communication system designed by the USA that later developed into World Wide Web. The roots of digital journalism can be founded in the teletext, called at that time ‘A Rodolex in the Sky’. As the primitive forms of TV and radio news, those first examples of digital journalism were based on previous technologies, for example, teletext was based on TV instead of the Internet, in the same way as TV news followed radio news format in their early years and the first radio news broadcasting was not much different from ‘reading newspapers’.

Regarding to the criticism, TV news were, at least, as much criticised as digital journalism is nowadays. Most of critics take as point of departure for their arguments the hypothesis of the displacement of traditional news by online news and citizen journalism. Something happened some decades ago with the rise of television news broadcast, that was said to not be able displace newspapers in the field of information (Untelevisable Times, 1946).

It seems to be cyclical process. Everytime a new technology arises and carries some development in the field of journalism,  more consevative critics see it as the devil, while more progresist critics see a new world of opportunities to make things better.

The first reason is that it deals with the current state of affairs of that subject. Recently, it was broadcast by mass media in Spain that the Pandemic categorization of the Swine Flu has been a fake. It was one of the most important spanish journalists, Inaki Gabilondo, the one that turned on the alarm on in the CNN+ News.  His theories, as well as the ones presented by Jaime Rubio Rosales, the author of the news blog that is going to be analyzed, are based on declarations by Wolfgang Wodarg, president of the Health Committee of the European Cabinet. He said that the pandemic flu was “a fake promoted by World Health Organization and the giants of the pharmaceutic industry to save the current economic crisis and make some more millions of Euros”.

The blog appears embedded in noticiasgrancanaria.com and its main purpose is to inform the people about a real important subject that has not been broadcasted as it should in the mainstream media. Its audience is difficult to retrieve but I think is not as much as it should, due to the importance of the information given. What are the reasons for such a short audience? Well, the website where it is embedded is a local website that usually deals with subjects and issues around the Canary Islands. The most important traffic of readers should arrive through Google. Indeed, that’s how I found this blog post.

About the post authenticity and validity, I have to say that his author is a well respected writer and journalist, who has made good contributions to both traditional and online journalism. In addition to that, he resorts not to his own theories but to declarations and information given by more well-known media and figures. Since the new came to stage, a lot of blogs had dealt with such a problematic subject but I have chosen this because it resorts better to his sources and seems to be more reliable, taking account what it has already been said.

It can considered as a blog within an independent media, since I far as I know, the website does not belong to any other major corporation or media industry. Mainstream media seems to not have gone deeper in the subject and independent media looks, at least, as a good point of departure for a deeper investigative reporting about the subject. Since blogs do not depend on the commercial functioning of media, at least this one does not, they can be considered much more independent than traditional media and this is probably a reason why those established media hasn’t gone deeper on the subject, because they have much more pressure than the new media in general, or bloggin in particular.

As a conclusion, it could be said that what we find in this blog is different material than that we can find in traditional media. It’s not constrained by any previous convention and a lot of people can get into it. His author got a much wider audience than what he could have achieved by publishing in any Canarian Island local newspaper. In addition to that, he also covers a gap that most of mainstream media have been reticent to spread. To evaluate the blog, I would say that is a good blog, which resorts to already given information and also exposes important ideas expressed in a very good quality language. Its status of independent make it much more attractive when we try to approach to that subjects with important organizations or even governments involved.