Blogging blogging

Weblogs have become, in my opinion, the most effective way to communicate news in a rapid manner. Of course, dedicated news websites and publications have their place, but I gather more of my news about current events topics that I follow from weblogs than from any other source.

More telling, many of these weblogs are not “traditional” news sources, but sources written by independent journalists or bloggers who function outside the traditional channels. An example of such a weblog that bridges the worlds of traditional and non-traditional journalism is Jules Crittenden’s Forward Movement weblog. Crittenden is an editor and columnist for the Boston Herald, but on his own weblog he acts as an aggregator and commentator on news items he finds important. I read his weblog daily.

On any given day, Crittenden’s weblog may cover a dozen different subjects ranging from the contentious to the hilarious, from politics to religion. It is difficult to nail down exactly what his weblog is about simply because it is about whatever he wants it to be.

Crittenden’s personal weblog contrasts in some respects to the weblogs written for traditional news sources mostly in its more open format (read lack of external editorial controls) and its more freeform approach to its subject matter. Most weblogs from traditional sources tend to be more focused on the writer’s assigned beat and more controlled in what is written.

One example of such a blog is “The God Vote” weblog of Jacques Berlinerblau for the Washington Post and Newsweek that focuses on the impact of religion and religious rhetoric on the 2008 political campaign. In his most recent post, he discusses how the focus on a candidate’s religion is representative of the ongoing blurring of the line between public and private life. This sharp focus contrasts greatly with Crittenden’s weblog, but at the same time makes Berlinerblau’s posts more thorough and poignant.

Another example of a traditional source blog is the “Baghdad Bureau” weblog of the New York Times. This weblog is written by the staff of the Times’s Baghdad Bureau and functions far more like Crittenden’s weblog but with more criticism. The latest post on that blog is a recounting of Times photographer Johan Spanner’s memories of the Abu Ghraib prison both before and after the fall of Baghdad in 2003. His recounting also conjures images, intentionally or not, of events there a year later.

Each of these weblogs have their good and bad point due as much to the writers as the formats. What they all prove, however, is the undeniable power of the weblog to convey news in ways that traditional sources cannot, which I believe will become more the way people get their news in the future.