Finding our way through blogland

While Christie Blatchford sees blogging as a pox (see Why Blatchford Won’t
Blog
), the universe nonetheless continues to unfold along lines that are
more conversational than monologic. To address some of the obvious problems of a
less fettered reporting environment, a Facebook group called News Bloggers for
Fairness in Reporting recently developed a News Bloggers Code of
Ethics
. More ambitiously, Paul Bradshaw’s Model for the 21st
Century Newsroom
shows how twitter, moblogs, wikis and other social
networking tools can feed into solid contextual reporting. (If you don’t know
what those words mean, read the article).

One thing is certain, if citizens feel their voices aren’t
part of mainstream media coverage, they now have the tools to go ahead and make
their own media. The Media Giraffe Project at the University of Massachusetts
Amherst
has produced a web video – Journalism That Matters:
A Passion for Place
– about a group of citizens who create their own local
online news community.