Author: nibaq

This is a time lapse of the Kuwait Towers with storm clouds slowy brewing.

Whats fascinates me is the sun moving across and damn is it bright.

This is a time lapse of the Kuwait Towers with storm clouds slowy brewing.

Whats fascinates me is the sun moving across and damn is it bright.

This is an old long debate that even the word blogger is not limited to just blogs anymore. So seeing this article Literary Lesson: Authors, website Poets Write the News where the Haaretz decided to send their 31 journalists and replace them with writers, poets and authors.

The TV review by Eshkol Nevo opened with these words: “I didn’t watch TV yesterday.” And the weather report was a poem by Roni Somek, titled “Summer Sonnet.” (“Summer is the pencil/that is least sharp/in the seasons’ pencil case.”)

What it did was create a different interpretation of the news. Journalists are trained to provide data, they can’t offer an opinion on what occurred or even interfere. They are observers, their paid job is to simply report and, in essence, find the truth of the matter; and by printing it they allow the readers to decide. Bloggers, like writers and poets, don’t follow the journalist decorum. First off they aren’t paid to be unbiased since this isn’t a paying job. They simply interpret the data they get from journalists and offer it in a different light by attaching emotion, or making it abstract so that it is transformed into something that moves the reader passionately.

This is usually where the trouble begins: the reader gets motivated by the bloggers’ writing based on the journalists’ effort – wherein the blogger gets most of the credit, even though the blog post has a link to the original article. This ends up with newspapers calling bloggers parasites for stealing their hits and ad revenue. Yet it is a symbiotic relationship.

Newspapers have to catch up with what the reader wants and offer both. Simply put: make it a competition between bloggers to have their interpretation of the journalistic alongside the main article. How this would work is quite simple. The main journalist’s article is published and a select group of bloggers will interpret the the news and submit their posts to the editor to be placed next to the article. What happens here is that newspapers gets the best of both worlds and don’t lose their ad revenue from external hits. The added benefit for the bloggers is that they get paid for this.

One caveat is that I don’t see this as an up voting system that creates a competition based on fan base. I leave this for the editor of the paper to create their own system and rules. It is their job to manage the paper and offer the reader the best commentary.