Digital Age theives?

Paul Bradshaw, author of the Online Journalism Blog, recently published a post that got me thinking. As his posts on the development of Web2.0 usually do.

This time I threw my thoughts into the conversation.

Below is my response to his post on how bloggers are viewed by those media execs types.

My response on the Online Journalism Blog to Paul's post.

The mention of bloggers and our parasitic ways, of supposedly leeching from mainstream media is just narrow minded, and money focused rather than information.

We are a network that feeds each other, tribes of people with the same interests, re-tweeting what we liked to hear. We create our own news away from a centralised hub of ‘validated’ content.

When writing my reasonably small thesis on the use of Twitter as a breaking news platform it became apparent, even then, that this tool would allow citizen journalism to flourish. Away from the reliance of say, the BBC, to collect and disseminate our news for us- 7 July bombings for example.

In its early days, and I am sure even more so now, twitter broke news ahead of Reuters- those PR companies that Murdoch and co relies on. Is Reuters even as valued as before?

Bloggers create their own news and network, tweeting, searching, bookmarking. Building on an already established genre of journalism. To say that this is amateur and trivial is denying its purpose and its value.

Blogging is both valuable and diverse, and could not be more of a reflection of the people that read it, as well as create it.