Redefining the News

I chose the link http://bloggingheads.tv/ that was posted in the comments section of Ryan Sholin's blog. Because I am an avid reader of the New York Times, I was already aware of this site and have enjoyed watching different bloggers dispute many current topics.

This is what I find most interesting about this site, watching different people with different views discuss critical issues. This to me seems more real than many of the paid pundits on CNN, Fox News, or MSNBC who have a very specific and sometimes phony viewpoint. These TV pundit's 'over the top' behavior mostly seems to help them get 'over the top' ratings, which in turn provides them with 'over the top' salaries. The bloggers on Bloggheads.tv seem to be more interested in really discussing the issues and come from a wide range of backgrounds, not just white, male and upper middle class.

I do think that sites like Bloggingheads.tv hold promise for online journalism because of this willingness to display so many points of view. The Bloggingheads folks call themselves the 'classic expression of the Internet', but espouse on their About page that,

'...We hope to be in one sense an unusual expression of the Internet. Almost all blogs have a dominant ideology and a fairly homogeneous comments section to match. We pride ourselves on having a diversity of views in our diavlogs and an accordingly diverse comments section, where thoughtful disagreement is expressed in civil terms (OK, usually thoughtful, and usually civil).'

This is journalism that, as Ryan Sholin puts it on his Inventing Journalism page, serves the community, brings disparate facts together to form a larger, clearer picture and tells necessary stories that otherwise vanish into obscurity.

This is the direction that not just online journalism but journalism as a whole should be going and hopefully with sites like bloggingheads.tv, will continue to go.