The Rise of Blog Nation

The growth of blogs in popular culture is becoming more widely accepted in the media industry, but journalism programs aren’t rushing to toss out their old curriculums just yet

By Lydia Lum  

For journalism students at the University of California-Berkeley, blogging is just one more responsibility to juggle during the course of the day.

Students already hustling to meet reporting deadlines are also scrambling to post their daily blog entry, which doesn’t leave much time to groom sources outside the newsroom.

Their conflict is the result of some educators adding blogging into journalism and communications courses. By requiring students to produce the online journals alongside traditional news and feature stories, educators have found new opportunities to illustrate challenges facing professional reporters and editors.

“They’re learning about life at small newspapers,” says Paul Grabowicz, director of UC Berkeley’s new media program. “If they’re cranking out two or three stories a day, plus a blog, they don’t have much time to get out of the newsroom to go reporting. So they have to figure out how, and when, to do it.”

The rise and popularity of blogs — short for “Web logs” — are by no means causing journalism educators to overhaul their teachings. In fact,

blogging’s influence varies from one university program to the next, just like it varies among different publications in the country. Despite their rising popularity, blogs still have only a fraction of the impact on the curriculum that convergence does. Convergence is the cross-training of students to specialize in one medium such as broadcast or print, while learning basic skills in other media (see Black Issues, July 15, 2004).

Yet blogs are becoming a widely accepted form of media in the eyes of the popular culture. In a historic move, some bloggers were issued media credentials to cover the 2004 national Democratic and Republican conventions. Whereas bloggers initially were people who had no voice in the established media, their writings are gaining more respect and increasingly driving news coverage. More and more newspapers and magazines are adding blogs to their Web sites. In some cases, the bloggers are community residents with expertise in topics as broad as information technology or as narrow as a neighborhood’s nightlife offerings. In other cases, the bloggers are staff reporters who cover beats such as politics, sports and entertainment. Their cyberspace journals supplement the traditional hard-copy coverage. A blog’s first-person online format creates a continuous forum by letting readers respond to the writer’s entries with comments, questions and criticisms. The entries themselves also tend to be much shorter and less formally structured than news stories.