Burnt Orange Report

The rise of the blogs

By Nathan Nance

Guest post by Nate Nance

Byron's earlier post about blogging seemed to be answering a question that a lot of bloggers have asked since the election. What now?

I think the vast majority of political bloggers are going to stick with it. The really good ones are obsessed with it; it's an addiction that doesn't go away with one election cycle. I know I can't possibly stop. Blogging is a revolution in the way people gather and disseminate information. It's an intensely personal form of communication that reaches out to people across the globe. And you don't even need big media credentials to do it. With all it's flaws, I think blogging is still democracy at its finest.

I've always thought that the next step would be for blogs to gain legitimacy by merging with more traditional forms of media. The likes of Hardblogger and Bloggerman at MSNBC.com show the way. There are several newspapers who now have blogs, albeit nothing as independent-minded as Political Animal.

And then the tsunami came. The next wave of the revolution has already started as bloggers in Asia have begun acting as news reporters, collecting first-hand accounts from the disaster area.

Many of the blogs involved have been gathering first-hand reports from the affected areas, via telephone and email. First-hand reports, interviews, historical and scientific perspectives -- blogs are acting like news services. And you're the winner, as you can learn a lot from reading these reports.  Check some of them out, as this sort of thing is likely to be the wave of the future.

I don't think it will be very much longer before newspapers have bloggers on staff. As more people get their news from the Internet, and more people turn to the more entertaining and informative, if sometimes biased, blogosphere for the latest, it will become inevitable.

This is a guest post from Nathan Nance. Nate is a sports/news clerk at the Waco Tribune-Herald and writer/editor of Common Sense a Texas-based Democratic Web log. He can be reached at nate_nance@yahoo.com.