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Is Blogging Journalism?

November 30, 2009 by Taran Rampersad

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

Blogging seems like fun. I ought to start one day... when I have time. Our government is actually proving to be a strong motivator for me to start. I just have to learn where journalism draws the line (I mean, ranting online that the PM is a @#$%hole is probably not journalism). Or do I have a misconception, that blogging/social commentary is not journalism?

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}

Where Is The Information?

October 30, 2009 by Taran Rampersad

One of the problems I have with the local media is that, generally speaking, I don't think the public gets what it needs for informed discussion. When I glanced over the debacle over the '2 million dollar flag' on the Trinidad Guardian, I wondered where that figure magically sprang from.

Who said that the flag cost 2 million dollars? Where's the source? Was this number dreamed up at the taxi stand or the PTSC terminal? 

La Diva's comment was pure platinum. Go read it here.

I can understand when politicians don't answer questions - but publish the questions that they don't answer and say they didn't answer them. I can understand that sort of thing.

But what I cannot understand is why the media doesn't give the public more facts. Come on, bring us facts. That's what the media is supposed to do.

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