Reading Journal 2

I thought it would be appropriate to read Robert Macky's "The Lede" after his visit to class last week. As we continue to discuss the differences as well as the advantages and the disadvantages between print media and blogging, I wanted to closely analyze Macky's methods of writing and communicating news to his audience.

The first thing I noticed about Macky's blog was his tendency to use video in most entries. As he mentioned in class, he considers blogging to be more closely joined with televised news casting as opposed to traditional print media. With the crucial principle of rapidity in news broadcasting, video may be the most important medium in achieving this goal. For example, in his article titled "Protests in Pakistan at Long Jail Term for Scientist in U.S.", published on Friday, September 24th, Macky uses a video clip to convey the chaos in the Pakistani streets. It is simple examples like these that truly show the importance of video in the way we absorb news. To actually "see" the conflict is far more powerful than just reading about it, which is perhaps the most critical advantage blogging has over print media.

Another element of blogging that we discussed last week was the instantaneous quality of this medium. Unlike a newspaper, a blog has the advantage of working on a 24-hour cycle. If the author has obtained incorrect information about an event, he or she can simply update the blog and fix the mistake (or add more information). For example, (I may be reading this wrong but this is what I inferred) in Macky's article titled "Obama Calls Ahmadinejad's 9/11 Comments 'Inexcusable'", the headline begins as "updated 3:13pm" Although I was not able to read the original article, that leads me to believe that Macky had written something, and then went back at a later time to add more information to the article.