Blogs Today

Do blogs challenge the role of traditional news media? Perhaps at one stage in the recent past they were beginning to draw small amounts of audiences completely away from newspapers and television news, however the people who control the traditional news media saw this new form of information gathering rising and instead of trying to oppose it they seem to have embraced it. When I type "political blogs" into Yahoo!Xtra Search the first page of results include blogs such as the Los Angeles Times political blog, the CNN 'politicalticker' blog, the ABC News politics blog, and 'The Caucus' - a political blog from the New York Times. Now these aren't C-list bloggers revealing their political thoughts from their living rooms, these are senior news correspondents writing for some of the most recognised examples of traditional news media in the world. Most news outlets have uploaded news stories online for a while, but they have now recognised blogging as a new form of writing and to continue appeal to all audiences on a broad scale we are beginning to see blogs encorporated into news services more and more frequently. The New Zealand Herald has just recently revealed an updated blog section of their website, and it also seems TVNZ and TV3 are slowly starting to introduce blogs to theirs as well.

However with blogging being recognised as a new style of writing, we certainly do have more access to new sides of political candidates that take part... TechPresident alerted me to a twitter update 14 hours ago from Hillary Clinton saying "It has been a hard fought race but I have a proposal for the Democratic Party – I challenge Senator Obama to a bowl-off, winner takes all." I thought this was odd, but in a few minutes after a trip over to the New York Times political blog I found that this was actually an April Fool's joke Hillary played to a news conference relating to Barack Obama's recent bowling trip (see below).