Resumen de Weblogs and Journalism: A Typology to Explore the Blurring Boundaries
David Domingo Santamaria, Ari Heinonen
From the perspective of journalism, weblogs can be seen as a new category of news and current affairs communication. Although most weblogs do not even pretend to be journal- istic or related to current events in the sense shared by institutional media, when bloggers approach the arena of journalism, some of their working principles can challenge tradi- tional professional standards: Conversation with the audience, transparency in the report- ing process or even participatory news production are common in blogging. By challeng- ing the conventional understanding of what journalism is, weblogs have revitalized the voices that expect a paradigm shift in journalism in the Internet era. In order to contrib- ute to the debate on the influences of weblogs on journalism and make it more system- atic, we propose a typology of journalistic weblogs, along a continuum ranging from the least to the most institutionalized in terms of their relationship to the established media:
At one end, we find weblogs produced by the public outside media companies, and at the other end, we find those that are part of media content and produced by professional staff journalists. We argue that weblogs are a symbol of the ongoing change in the relationship between citizens, media and journalists – a change that questions the basic assumptions of the traditional roles of institutional journalism.
