Blogs add video to become diavlogs
Are Web logs cutting edge journalism or are they really today's pennysavers?According to a story in today's New York Sun, two bloggers have set up a Web site called bloggingheads.tv where they and other bloggers get together to hold diavlogs (video dialogs).
Apparently some Web users want to see bloggers and not just read what they have to say without commercials that limit debates on the Sunday morning news shows.
But the technology of the diavlog is still lacking. The article compared watching the blogging heads to watching slow moving NASA video at times.
This leads me back to my original question. Will blogs someday be the newspapers of today with some other medium threatening to pull their plugs (Good evening, this is Larry Gillick with the Second Life Evening News) and diavlogs replacing Face the Nation?
I hope not. I for one believe that journalists have ethics and training so they don't inject their own opinion into reporting. I can't say that for citizen journalists. If someone writes that President Bush has offered Saddam asylum if he marries Jenna, I know I wouldn't believe it and would question the motive behind the blogger's writing. While each may have their place, I don't think blogs replace legitimate journalism.
But in another story Monday morning, Reuters carried a report that an Ipsos MORI poll found that Internet journals are a more trusted source of information in Europe than TV advertising or e-mail marketing. Apparently, blogs are replacing word of mouth for endorsing or condemning a product or service.
The survey found that 24 percent of Europeans trust blogs, 17 percent trust TV advertising and 14 percent trust e-mail marketing. Newspapers hold on to a narrow lead with 30 percent trusting print ads.
As the blogs become more popular, could they overtake trust in newspaper advertising? That would force advertisers to divert their ad budgets from newspapers and shrink news hole even more or possibly put some smaller, less-profitable newspapers out of business.
And instead of requiring the IJ students in Cohort 10 to write articles that get graded, will Amy make them blog and diavlog for grades?
-- Mark H
posted by Mark H. @ 11/13/2006 01:27:00 PM
3 Comments:
Are you familiar with the Naked News? It's these hot chicks up in Canada who get naked while doing the news.
So naturally I'm looking for someone to start Naked Diavlogs. Can you say Michelle Malkin vs. Ana Marie Cox???
Max
I have been thinking about this whole blogging movement a lot more lately -- mostly in terms of the way blogs are written. I think eventually we may see a "blanguage" for news, a sort of blogging-style way of writing a news article, like USA TODAY's breaking news blog. Not yet, mind you ... but maybe ...
Amy
Nov. 16
I read the article in the NY Sun several times. Although "diavlog" sounds catchy as a new media term, these two guys are doing the same thing that has been done for years on TV with pundits in different locations arguing on a split-screen monitor.
The difference is that now one doesn't have to rig the two video feeds and all that broadcast equipment. All that hardware has been reduced to two PCs with webcams connected to the Internet.
Also these "blogging heads" are not your ordinary YouTube alumni.
Robert Wright and Mickey Kaus, the diavloggers in question, alternated writing the TRB column in the New Republic in the mid-1990's, according to the Sun's report.
Wright, who according to the article is co-teaching a seminar at Princeton on ethics, was described as taking a career-changing course at Princeton with essayist John McPhee.
These guys may have NASA-quality video but I'll bet their diavloging is a cut above the typical crowdsourced information.
Michael
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