Journalism, Blogging and the Real-Time WebKathy E. Gill12 October 2009

Journalism is, in the words of James W. Carey: “our day book, our collective diary, which records our common life. That which goes unrecorded goes unpreserved except in the vanishing moment of our individual lives.”

Media Consumption Timeline

A Short Internet TimelineNovember 1990: one web host (CERN)1994: the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives added web servers1994: the San Jose Mercury News launched the first online newspaper1998: ~300 million web pages2000: Google had indexed 1B web pagesJuly 2008: Google had indexed 1T web pages

Abbreviated Blogging Timeline1999: Yahoo! buys GeoCities, host to 3.5 million individual Web sites (most abandoned!)1999: the Poynter Institute starts the “MediaNews” blog2002: Google buys Blogger; estimate of 500,000 blogs worldwide in totalFebruary 2002: Salon and Fox News add blogs2003: Iraq war gives rise to war blogger2009: 6 million blogs on Wordpress.com; >1B monthly pageviews; Yahoo! shutters GeoCities

Real-Time ReportingThe Charlotte Observer used a blog format to report on Hurricane Bonnie in August 1998; “Dispatches from the Coast” is the first known use of blog to cover a breaking news story.

1970

1989

2009

What Changed?

Increasingly Disintermediated

TransmissionNetworks

Transmission Speed

Enter: The Real-Time Web

Twitter & IranAmplified voices of dissentFacilitated misinformation (intentional and unintentional)Incomplete storyEmotional Triggered MSM response

Experiments In Live TweetsOregonian (note date launched)Multi-organization collaboration – Washington Floods, 2009A Contrarian View of Twitter and Iran, June 2009

Rise Of The SmartPhone

April 2009 “Mobile Technographics®”Mobile Data Usage Cuts Across Age Groups

June 2009 “Working iPhone Owners Tap The Mobile Internet”More Working iPhone Owners Use Social Media

April 2009 “Mobile Technographics®”Mobile Technographics: Understanding The Connected Consumer

SummaryBlogging is part of the web’s evolutionary pathThe real time web (Twitter et al) is the next mediamorphosisImpact on civic life will depend on media literacy efforts

LicenseCreative Commons, share-and-share alike, attribution, non-commercialKathy E. Gill@kegillkegill@uw.eduhttp://faculty.washington.edu/kegillhttp://wiredpen.com/

CreditsKent State, photo John Paul Filo,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootingsTank Man, http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/behind-the-scenes-tank-man-of-tiananmen/Death of NedaAgha-Solton, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Neda_Agha-Soltan