According to The Wall Street Journal, in 2009 the United States alone had over 20 million bloggers, with nearly 1.7 million making a profit from their work, and almost half a million who used blogging as their primary source of income. While many older journalists may look at the notion of a blogger as a journalist or news writer to be absurd, there are a number of examples that show how the blogger fills in a number of gaps left by traditional news coverage, these include: providing street level coverage of local and national protests, providing summaries and transcripts of educational conferences and much more. Normally, these stories and ideas would go unreported and unrecorded by the mainstream media sources because they are too specific or too small to merit coverage and an in depth article. The blogger fills this niche perfectly, and while their coverage may not be the most professional or grammatically correct, they do in fact provide news about events that interest a significant number of people.
Clay Shirky, a Professor at NYU, describes the difference between bloggers and traditional journalists like this, “The order of things in broadcast is ‘filter, then publish’. The order in communities is ‘publish, then filter’… Writers submit their stories in advance to be edited or rejected, participants in a community say what they have to say, and the good is sorted from the mediocre after the fact.” This is a dramatic shift from the normal form of journalism where the news outlet chooses what information is given to the consumer. Blogs allow for the public to individualize and report news that they find interesting, and if others find it interesting too then they receive benefits in the form of online ad revenue. As Lisa Rein, a popular news blogger, writes, “the networks aren’t interested unless [programming] will attract millions of dollars in advertising revenues. Meanwhile, there are people and events all around us that are meaningful and that people would love to watch.” By providing an easy way for individuals to record and report on events that they believe are important, the internet hasn’t supplanted traditional journalism, instead it supplements it and provides a local and individual look at both popular and obscure events.
However, this form of journalism also has potential dangers. Although the internet has made journalism more egalitarian and social, the ability for anyone to write news or stories means that there is no vetting or editing process for blogger’s stories. Thus, information becomes more subjective and is no longer presented in an impartial and fair manner. Bardoel and Deuze warn, “the multimediality of online content and the windowing of content might result in a weakened ‘grip’ of the journalistic professional practice and culture on mediated content, and with it the struggle for independent information provision during the last one or two centuries.”