As kentbye reported on the Echo Chamber Project site, in a session on journalism at the BloggerCon III conference back in November, 2004, which was podcast by ITconsersations, Jay Rosen talked about how people start with the emotional passion of opinions and then go and research the facts — as opposed to the traditional paradigm of facts -> analysis -> opinion.

Indeed an interesting observation when comparing blogging and traditional news reporting. It’s worth capturing Jay’s quote as recorded by kentbye:

"(…)JAY ROSEN: I want to put one idea in people’s heads. The great thing about blogs for journalists is that it is "denaturalizing" their world. It’s making their assumptions clear for the first time.

So in the mainstream journalism world, it is natural — it is obvious — that the first thing you need is reliable information — news. And from that we can have analysis. And then further down in the transaction, there’s opinion.

And so a well-rounded information diet begins with facts and news, moves to analysis, and later on opinion — which is also the stages a journalist goes through in their career. You start off being a reporter. Maybe we’ll let you do some analysis pieces later on. And eventually you become a columnist.

What blogging is doing is showing that that’s just a convention. It’s just a convenient way of dividing up the world. And while it may be true that people get their facts first, and then they kind of want some analysis, and then they move onto opinion. It also works in the reverse.

Lots of people get engaged first through argument. And it’s argument that causes them to look for information. And to me this is one of the most valuable things about blogging. It’s denaturalizing the journalist’s view of how the world works. Because a lot of people want to enter into the public world through the eyes and the arguments and the ideas of bloggers. And it’s from there that they go in search of news stories and information.

And not only is that just as good a way of getting the news, but it even might be more natural. (…)"

Technorati Tags: Jay Rosen, journalism, blogging, news, facts, analysis, opinion

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