2004 was clearly the Year of the Blog.
The two biggest news stories of the year—the Tsunami in Asia and the US Presidential Election—were far more significant than the story of the rise of blogs.
But the reason why 2004 was the year of the blog can most clearly be seen by the scope and quality of the coverage of each of these events by the blogosphere. Each of these enormous events helped to solidify the blogoshpere as the new citizen journalism. And concurrently, each of these events was better and more quickly covered by the blogosphere than the MSM could have ever dreamed of.
During the Presidential campaigns blog readership swelled, both on the left and on the right. Powerline led the online investigation to the merits of the memos used in Dan Rather’s pathetic, partisan-laced attempt to bring down a sitting President during an election. Their post, The Sixty-First Minute, is perhaps the single most powerful, relevant, and important post of the year. Time magazine agreed, naming Poweline the Blog of the Year in its Man of the Year issue.
The MSM still doesn’t seem to know how to deal with bloggers, though.
Jonathan Klein, the former executive vice president of CBS news complained, “You couldn’t have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of check and balances [employed by 60 Minutes] and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing.”
Or the complete meltdown by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s third-rate columnist, Nick Coleman, who lost all journalistic credibility when he lashed out on a fact-free, vindictive rant against Powerline, who had questioned several of Coleman’s flawed columns.
Some journalists, such as Jack Kelly of the Jewish World Review, are starting to get the picture:
People who work at journalism full time ought to be able to do a better job of it than people for whom it is a hobby. But that’s not going to happen as long as we “professional” journalists ignore stories we don’t like and try to hide our mistakes. We think of ourselves as “gatekeepers.” But there is not much future in being a gatekeeper when the walls are down.
The Wall Street Journal acknowledges the important role that blogs, especially video blogs, played in the coverage of the Asian Tsunami.
The tsunami films may be a break-out moment for video blogs, but observers say its still unclear where the phenomenon is headed. Jeff Jarvis, a blogger at buzzmachine.com and the creator of Entertainment Weekly magazine, predicts video blogging will evolve into “the new definition of a TV show,” especially as bloggers start to add their own content and commentary to news footage.
The latest Pew Internet and American Life study has astounding findings on the growth of blogs:
- 7% of the 120 million U.S. adults who use the Internet say they have created a blog or web-based diary. That represents more than 8 million people.
- 27% of internet users say they read blogs, a 58% jump from the 17% who told us they were blog readers in February.
- 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online. This is a first-time measurement from our surveys and is an indicator that this application is gaining an impressive foothold.
- The interactive features of many blogs are also catching on: 12% of Internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs.
- At the same time, for all the excitement about blogs and the media coverage of them, blogs have not yet become recognized by a majority of internet users. Only 38% of all Internet users know what a blog is. The rest are not sure what the term “blog†means.
