Blogging in the News
Every Morning my alarm wakes me up with NPR News. This morning as you would expect they were talking about the DNC convention and how the messages in last night's speeches were resonating with the masses. Peppered in amongst this news was a piece about how this convention was being covered by 35 members of the blogosphere. Which incedently included a tape recording of Dave Winer talking about the how the Boston security officals were "polite". NPR went on to highlight Bloggers irreverent styles, by reading this quote form Dave's first posts yesterday:"Well, the convention has started. It's boring beyond belief. It can only get better." - scripting.com
Later this morning during a commercial radio top-of-the-hour news segment, sandwiched between Imus and ESPN Radio, a reporter slowly read a different part of Dave's post:
"It sounds like this: blah blah blah John Kerry blah blah Kerry Edwards blah blah values values values blah blah John Kerry blah blah blah standing at a crossroads blah blah. " - scripting.com
They prefaced his quote by describing blogs as website composed mainly of the top-of-the-mind ramblings of their authors. The implication seemed to be that blogging's contribution to news events was more entertainment than anything approaching news. Finishing the segment they said something to the effect of, 'Now I bet you would never hear something like that from traditional journalists'.
It's interesting to me that blogging has been mentioned so much this week in traditional news. I'm also struck by the news media's choice of quotes. Dave's boredom quote was a "top-of-the-mind rambling", which seemed to play into their preconception of what blogging is, so they went with it.