Is Online Journalism Good for Democracy?

            The Internet and specifically the World Wide Web has had huge impacts on Journalism. In the last several years, Online Journalism has emerged. Journalists use specific strategies such as:  annotative reporting, computer assisted reporting, open source journalism, and hyperadaptive news sites.

            In this essay, I would like to focus on open source journalism. It is journalism produced by citizens, scholars, community activists, who not only write the stories, but also make them available for editing and corrections before final publication. Some examples of citizen journalism are: blogs, social networks, Wikipedia ( here is one of my own entries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldovi%C5%A3a ), and other new technology tools.

            The blogosphere is growing up. PubSub estimates that blogosphere has more than 8 million Weblogs, or online journals own and written by the new “pamphleteers”. As most authors agree, bloggers have different rules and standards from traditional journalists. For instance, Rebeca Blood, the author of “The Weblog Handbook”, has described six ethical standards for bloggers. At the same time, Steve Rube, the owner of Micropersuasion blog, argues that “the blogosphere runs on customs and norms—on what the community feels acceptable”.

            Although blogs lack the credibility of news organizations, I believe that blogging has improved Journalism and is good for Democracy—due to an immense number of people reading and commenting on news stories, and because of sourcing. For example, prior to the invasion of Iraq, Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com provided the public with much wider perspective of the invasion than traditional media organizations. Later, it was proved that bloggers’ news was correct and that the invasion was based on pre-war intelligence that was not credible and valid.