Category: blogging

Social Media, the Media, and T&T

March 15, 2010 by Taran Rampersad

When I was reading a discussion related to social media/blogs in Trinidad and Tobago, someone made a point that gave me pause. The point was that without newspapers, local blogs would be dead in the water. Try as I might to disagree, a poll of Trinidad and Tobago blogs reveals that this is fairly true.

When it comes to actual news, Trinidad and Tobago blogs simply aren't very pro-active. In fact, they are pretty reactive to the media. For the larger issues, such as things related to government or the ever present scandals that involve the Government of Trinidad and Tobago, there is little to do about it. After all, who has access to the Government has access to the stories - and the fact that the average citizen who can write a blog doesn't have the sort of access that the media has is nothing new. In time, perhaps, those of note in the government may open their seating to citizen journalists. This seems very unlikely in the present climate of Trinidad and Tobago, but it only takes one politician talking to a blogger to change that. It will be all downhill from there if the topic is the right one.

And then there's another distinction that must be made: citizen journalism is a subset of blogging. Blogging can cover 140 character transmissions on Twitter or it can cover posts such as itself. The content of the post defines whether it is citizen journalism or not - and frankly, journalism itself seems rather rare in Trinidad and Tobago. This is not to besmirch those that practice journalism in Trinidad and Tobago - it is simply to set them apart from those that claim to practice journalism in Trinidad and Tobago. {Read more}

Is Blogging Journalism?

November 30, 2009 by Taran Rampersad

Someone on Facebook who asked to remain anonymous asked me the following question:

That's a good question. And there's no easy answer.

My view - and there are many views, most apparently more popular than my own - is that the word blogging simply indicates the technology used, just as newsprint paper is typically used for newspapers. Not everything printed on newsprint paper is a newspaper; not everything that uses blog software technology is something I would consider to be writing or journalism.

Frankly, blogging can be whatever a particular blogger wants it to be. If you want to rant online and call political figures names, that would fall under blogging - but it almost certainly wouldn't fall under journalism.

So to answer the question, I need to frame what journalism is, at least for myself. To me, journalism is the reporting of facts and connecting facts in ways that inform people. In this way, blogging can be journalism. Journalism also contains Op-Ed pieces (social commentary is an example), and in this way blogging can also be journalism. But blogging, in and of itself, is not journalism. Blogging is simply a reference to how the information is published. {Read more}