Page 85 - Convergent Journalism an Introduction Writing and Producing Across Media

Blogs: Do-It-Yourself Journalism

Both forms demand the use of active rather than passive construc-
tions.
Captions for images, and copy for information graphics, fall some-
where in between. Their roots are in print journalism, but their writing
guidelines are not so different from those for TV. Caption information
is expected to fill in the gaps of what is not immediately obvious from
the visual information.
These various forms of media provide a quandary for the budding
journalist. Some people believe in sticking with one specialty, like
reporting for TV. Others urge new journalists to dabble in a little bit
of everything, from reporting for print to shooting video and recording
sound.
The world of convergence is a world of creative opportunities. Those
opportunities are most open to people who have more than one skill
and work across styles. Journalists who are not afraid to break the mold
on style, while adhering to the rules on substance and ethics, will then
be the ones who will create a new form of storytelling.
The early experiments in crossing borders include TV reporters and
personalities using the Web as an outlet for columns or commentary in 75
their areas of expertise. Newspaper reporters are writing and recording
voice tracks for slide shows on the Web. Radio reporters are snapping
photos to go along with posts of their audio to the Web.
It is a slow process, and each branch of journalism has its own
demands that must be learned and mastered.

Blogs: Do-It-Yourself Journalism

The blog represents freedom to writers, and it has recently become the
new frontier of journalism and journalistic writing.
Blog, short for “web log,” is just a personal online journal. At its
crudest, a blog is a recounting of the banality of life. At its best, a blog
is a form of personal journalism that opens the public up to a whole
new role in the news business.
Defining what blogs are can be tricky. They don’t follow any one
set of rules, which is where the freedom comes in. They do, however,
have some characteristics that most bloggers would agree on.
First, they tend to be rather personal. Blogs are very much about
points of view. The objectivity prized by most American news outlets
is not typical of a blog. Next, blogs tend to have short entries posted
on a whim. They are often fragmentary thoughts posted in response