BLOGGERS, BLOGGERS EVERYWHERE…
May 2nd, 2007 by Jon Barkan###
UPDATE: USA Today posted a blog entry saying ‘When bloggers are silenced, the world must speak for them.’ The article focuses on Abdel Kareem Nabil Soliman’s jailing for blogging about attacks he witnessed by Muslims on Coptic Christian establishments and the extremist views taught at Al-Azhar University in Cairo.
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Everyone is reading blogs these days. In one way, shape or form, we all read blogs of all different shapes and sizes.
From American Idol to ESPN, there are millions of blogs with many different levels of authority. But why?
The blogosphere is getting interesting in the area of covering world events. Newspapers, television stations, and radio stations all have blogs of what’s going on in the world as it happens.
In the New York Times yesterday, a great article ran on Matthew Lee, a blogger that covers the United Nations and has credentials to go to everything and anything about the United Nations.
It begs the question, why does Lee get credentials and since he does, who else should have them? It’s a very fine line that is going to be defined as time goes on.
From my past life at USA Today, I covered sporting events, and there’s not enough room half the time to accommodate the working media. When USA Today went online - we could’t get credentials to most of the major sporting events - now there’s not a major event that isn’t covered by the online news sites.
How and where can you even begin to draw the line if you start letting bloggers get credentials? And who decides which bloggers are credible and which aren’t?
The line is fuzzy for now, but over time, it will hopefully get defined.