Blogging news stories as they unfold is one of the most exciting and controversial applications of technology that bloggers have discovered and one of the best ways to make money blogging. One thing that makes the blogosphere so active is the fact that it is possible to update a blog instantaneously, so the news on blogs tends to be more current than the news in the paper, or on television. Unlike the news you get on tv or the newspapers, the news that you get on blogs do not need to go through editors before it gets to the public. There are advantages and disadvantages to it.
One of the most popular cases of news hitting a blog before appearing in other media is one of the terrorism attack that struck London in July 2005. As passengers were evacuated from a subway car near an explosion, one man took several photographs of the scene with his cellular phone, and within an hour these images were posted online. First-person accounts of the catastrophe began appearing on blogs soon after these photos appeared, and people all over the world learned about the events in London by reading the words and seeing the photos posted by bloggers.
With these stories being spread by people without any scripts from reporters makes it feel urgent to people from around the world. In the blogging sense, news will always come in a very personal context. This marks a birth of a new way of reporting, where journalism is put in the hands of the public.
Many bloggers and fans of the blogging believe that this way of getting news is a good democratic thing. By decentralizing the control of news, blogs allow more voices to enter the field of debate about important current events. There are on the other hand a lot of people as well who sees this as a bad thing, and they have really good reasons as well. Unlike newspapers or television stations, few blogs have fact- checkers let alone blog security, and there is little attention paid to journalistic accountability on many blogs. This can lead to the rapid spread of misinformation, and more than one falsehood has taken the blogosphere by storm. The questions about whether blogging news as it happens is ethical or not are very complicated, but no matter where you stand on the topic of current events blogs you are almost sure to agree that this movement has the potential to revolutionize how modern people get their news.
