Online Journalism Review includes my perspectives in its Look Back at 2003, and What’s on the Horizon for the Online News Universe. It’s an excellent article by Mark Glaser and requires no corrections.
Glaser wisely omitted a sentence (in italics below) in one of the paragraphs I contributed:
- The content management applications known as blogware greatly simplified the complexity of publishing online, allowing almost anyone easily to publish online. Just as how a million monkeys using typewriters will produce some bits of Shakespeare, three million humans using blogware produced a few hundreds sites worth regular reading. (A difference is that the monkeys don’t claim this will revolutionize journalism. Many journalists who blog claim that the group mulling of topics via the ‘blogsphere’ will ensure that truth and justice will prevail — claims that were equally made about bulletin boards, discussion lists, and Usenet newsgroups during previous decades.) An unfortunate side effect of blogware is it has facilitated monologues and narcissism to considered as online journalism. Nevertheless, blogs can be used as a journalistic tool, which is the only reason why I think blogs are the second of the two notable journalistic developments during 2003. The Neiman Foundation detailed some excellent usages of blogs by journalists
Glaser omitted it because I thought blogs were the second most notable online journalism development of 2003 and he found that most of the other contributors called it the first. No problem.
—Vin Crosbie