Newsday.com - Bloggers will file reports from Boston that could close big gaps in the media's coverage

Newsday.com - Opinion: "And I may do that, if I see him in Boston, because I will be there, with credentials to report on the event, along with 30 to 40 other authors who write and publish their own weblogs - some with an online user base nearing 100,000, others far less (mine is 5,000 or so in a good week). This is the first time the 'bloggers,' as they're called, will be invited to join the media crowd.

Often called 'online journals,' blogs are self-publishing in action: Web pages, typically written by one person and updated several times a day, with commentary on the news, links to what other blogs are saying, reactions to major events, and-for the successful ones-a devoted following on the Web. Some have comment sections where the users debate things.

There are more than 3 million weblogs on all topics, but the ones that have drawn the most attention, and won credentials in Boston, are mainly about politics and public life - with no pretense of neutrality. Dave Winer, who has been doing his blog since 1999, calls a weblog 'the unedited voice of one person.'

I think the bloggers have something to add:

They don't know in advance that what they are doing is meaningless; if they did, they wouldn't do it.

They don't assume that a ritual is an empty ritual simply because it obeys a script, since this is the very essence of ritual, as any Boy Scout or churchgoer can tell you.

Although we're told that 'bloggers wear their politics on their sleeves,' and things like that, politics is a personal matter for most of them - not a professional interest. Their communication style is citizen-to-citizen, rather than expert-to-layman or media to 'mass.'"


BY JAY ROSEN
Jay Rosen is chair of the journalism department at New York University and the author of PressThink (www.pressthink.org), a weblog.