Blogging has NOT Significantly Impacted Print Journalism

Hi everyone! My name is Karissa Dunn and I'm 20 years old. This semester will make it 2 years that I've attended COC and I'm almost ready to transfer to a Cal State. I decided to take this class because I want to become a journalist and what better way to see if I like journalism than by taking this introductory course.

I have to say that I got a little frustrated when I initially started my research. At first, when I read the thesis statement, I immediately thought "Of course blogging has significantly impacted the print journalism industry". The younger generations do everything online, including myself. We shop online, we chat online, we can even order pizza online now. Thinking that, I thought that blogging just had to have had an impact on the print journalism industry, but when I started to look for credible websites that supported that idea, no websites came up, only blogs about blogging being credible came up. After about an hour of searching and reading bloggers opinions on blogging, I realized that my initial thought was wrong, and blogging is not a credible source.

The print industry has strict guidelines that all of their journalists have to follow. The journalists must go out in the field and research their topic, interview people, and dedicate hours of research time before they can even start writing their article. Some bloggers on the other hand, don't do any research at all and believe that their opinion is correct and don't provide credible sources to back it up. Their blog is strictly their outlook on the topic, and defiantly not a credible source. On the other hand, there are some bloggers that do use credible sources and cite them in their blogs, but they are few and far between, and the print industry defiantly wins them over as far as credible articles go.

It dawned on me that blogging isn't credible when I read this blog a woman wrote about how mad she was that people say blogging isn't credible. (http://blogcritics.org/archives/2008/12/23/084330.php) At first she is somewhat convincing, but then she says "Local newspapers only print so many copies. How many hits does Yahoo have? Google News? CNN? They are all online." She bases her whole blog about these main sites, Google, Yahoo, CNN, etc. These sites are not blogs! They are credible new sources. Her whole article is completely irrelevant because she tries to say that Yahoo, Google and CNN are blogs.

In conclusion, I am defiantly against the statement: Blogging has significantly impacted the print journalism industry, because of what I just mentioned.