Pacific Views

Blogging in the News

Sports blogs, journalists' personal blogs, overseas blogging, and even academic blogging are getting their day in the spotlight.

The Seattle P-I writes about sports blogging:

...Where once Sports Illustrated might have seemed provocative with its swimsuit issues, probing journalism and biting commentary, nothing really can compare to the free-form exercise in sports-based freedom of speech propagated by a mushrooming field of Internet blogs.

Blogs, or Web logs as they once were known, allow anyone to start a World Wide Web site and open a talk-radio-like give-and-take exchange that can draw thousands of hits at the touch of a keyboard.

One site, sportsblogs.org, started as a single-page Web site and now lists 322 blogs, with 267 dedicated to baseball. Some have become so popular, they are selling advertising. Take Seattle-based F--edsports.com, which Forbes magazine rates as the fourth-best sports blog.

...No question, people are starting to pay attention.

"Buddy is finding that a lot of people prefer the voice of the little guy, that a lot of people are feeling disenfranchised by the major media and large traditional organizations in general," Maguire said about the future of sports blogs.

"People are looking for something new and fresh. They like the little guy to be able to say his thing."

...Blogging is the new wave of sports-talk radio. While traditional media are operating under far stricter codes of taste, ethics and responsibility, bloggers have moved on to the next topic.

Editor & Publisher on journalists who blog.

...That's one reason that The New York Times tightly controls personal blogs by its journalists. Of the companies I surveyed for this report, the Times was the most restrictive, by far. NYTimes.com Editor-in-Chief Len Apcar puts it bluntly: "I don't like the concept of the personal blog in terms of The New York Times."

Blogs are a fine medium, says Apcar, and he's been introducing staff-written blogs to NYTimes.com in recent months -- and hints that more experiments are to come. But in terms of a staff member writing a personal blog: forget it, for the most part.

...At MSNBC.com, personal blogging is covered pretty much by the same guidelines that cover outside freelance assignments by staffers. There's no specific policy about personal blogging, says Dean Wright, the Web site's editor-in-chief, but he has some clear rules in mind. Just as he wouldn't want to see a political reporter writing freelance opinion pieces for an advocacy magazine, an opinionated personal political blog would also be off limits. If the reporter wanted to do a blog on French sonnets or the history of the U.S. Civil War: no problem.

...One newsroom-employed blogger, who has had personal Web sites since the mid 1990s and who's morphed them into a regular blog (without informing his employer), complains about the common restriction on staff journalists expressing opinions. There's much that journalists know or have keen insight into that they can't express -- even on their own time. This journalist suggests that blogs are perhaps a way to get that voice out. Most newspapers, trying to maintain an aura of objectivity, are bland. In time, he hopes that the voice of blogging will enliven newspapers and humanize journalists. ...

Iran's blog boom makes the news:

...Thousands of Iranian blogs have cropped up since late 2001 when an Iranian emigre in Canada devised an easy way to use the free blogging service Blogger.com in Farsi. Though several English blogs outside Iran are read by Iranians, the most popular ones are in Farsi and operated inside the country.

...Bloggers in Iran have sidestepped censorship efforts, in part, by running sites through multiple servers and using foreign-based blogs as portals to Iranian ones whose locations may keep changing.

But more importantly, officials have not countered with their ultimate weapon: bringing all servers under government control.

Plans to outlaw privately run Internet service providers were announced last year, but were never followed through. Some suspect officials feared too much public outrage. But a new parliament could change the dynamics. ...

Blogs go mainstream at Stanford:

Increasingly more Stanford professors are using “Web logging,” more popularly known as “blogging.” in their classrooms. Traditionally used for online social networking — people write diary entries and others reply — blogging is now being used so that students can post messages and participate in discussions.
Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) Lecturer Christine Alfano said that she thought it was fitting to incorporate blogging into her E-Rhetorics class because of the class’ focus on electronic rhetoric and digital media. For her class, students post a message once a week about their research or thoughts on the material. ...