First Blog Entry Media and Society

My name is Ryan McCarney and I am currently in my second year at College of the Canyons. I play baseball for the cougars and am looking forward to the next couple of years in college. I do not happen to know much about blogging. According to http://codex.wordpress.org/Introduction_to_Blogging, blog is a term used to describe web sites that maintain an ongoing chronicle of information. I am looking forward to learning the entire blog process over the next several weeks. On pbs.com on a part of the website called Media Shift, Howard Kurtz, the dean of the media critics for the Washington Post, says that blogs are so effective because bloggers have a voice and emotions and are speaking directly to you. The simplest definition of a blog that I could find was on this site blogger.com in the tour that simply says a blog is a personal diary. A daily pulpit. A collaborative space. A political soapbox. A breaking-news outlet. A collection of links. Your own private thoughts. Memos to the world. Most importantly it says that your blog is whatever you want it to be. Now to address the three questions put forth to us... These answers for me will obviously be with not much experience in the field and only reading very little in to the blogging community. However, I am interested to see if my views on blogging change throughout the semester. I feel blogging can be a credible source of information. It obviously depends on the credibility of the source and what bias and how strong the bias is. I feel blogging can be very effective. As Kurtz said above it is more personable. I feel if utilized correctly blogging can help journalism. Journalists can use blogging to get what they are trying to get out to who they are trying to get that information to. I do believe that blogging has significantly impacted the print journalism industry. I feel that this is the technology era and so any way the internet can be used to do the same thing as a book or newspaper will significantly change the way printed material is utilized. As I said before I look forward to experiencing blogging for the first time.