From the Online Journalism Review

J.D. LASICA
Blogging as a Form of Journalism

Weblogs offer a vital, creative outlet for alternative voices

J.D. Lasica, OJR Senior Editor (jd@well.com)
posted: 2001-05-24 • modified: 2002-04-29
This is the first of a two-part series.
Part two, Weblogs: A New Source of News, appeared May 31.

Back around 1993, in the Web's neolithic days, starry-eyed Net denizens waxed poetic about a million Web sites blooming and supplanting the
mainstream media as a source of news, information and insight.

Then reality set in and those individual voices became lost in the ether as a million businesses lumbered onto the cyberspace stage, newspapers
clumsily grasped at viable online business models, and a handful of giant corporations made the Web safe for snoozing. But a funny thing happened on the way to the Web's irrelevance:

The blogging phenomenon, a grassroots movement that may sow the seeds for new forms of journalism, public discourse, interactivity and online community. While no one is really sure where this is all heading, my hunch is that blogging represents Ground Zero of the personal Webcasting revolution.

Weblogging will drive a powerful new form of amateur journalism as millions of Net users ; young people especially; take on the role of
columnist, reporter, analyst and publisher while fashioning their own personal broadcasting networks. It won't happen overnight, and we're now seeing only version 1.0, but just wait a few years when broadband and multimedia arrive in a big way.

For the uninitiated, a blog consists of a running commentary with pointers to other sites. Some, like Librarian.net, Jim Romenesko's Media News or
Steve Outing's E-Media Tidbits, cover entire industries by providing quick bursts of news with links to full stories. But most blogs are simply
rolling personal journals; ongoing links-laden riffs on a favorite subject.

For more on the basics of blogs, see the good backgrounders provided by OJR columnist Ken Layne and by Glenn Fleishman in the Seattle Times. I spoke this month with six journalists or writers who publish Weblogs and asked for their take on the phenomenon and its significance for
journalism. Three appear below and three will appear next week.

Paul Andrews

Andrews, who now lives in San Francisco, was technology columnist for the Seattle Times before taking an early buyout. He co-authored the book "Gates" (Doubleday, 1993) and wrote "How the Web Was Won" (Broadway Books, 1999), about Microsoft's embrace of the Internet. He began his Weblog in November.