Welcome to ColumBlogs, an online resource for everything related to blogging in Columbus, Ohio.
This website was started after a recent trend was noticed in local media publications where multiple city leaders and development consultants were citied as saying that Columbus doesn’t have enough bloggers. Seeing a gap that needed to be filled, we decided to create a resource to help local residents get started with their blogs and encourage them to take an active part in voicing their opinions both online and in person. We want to continue to see Columbus develop and progress, and the more vocal it’s citizens become, the more involved we can all be with making our city the best that it can be.
So, don’t think of this as an end-all site for how to blog, or what you should be blogging about, but instead as a good place to get started and a great place to keep up with what other people are doing and how the changing landscape of Columbus blogging is evolving on a daily basis.
Stay tuned for more information, tutorials, interviews, news updates, and more.
I am researching a comparison of “traditional” media journalism and First Amendment rights as compared to blogs, bloggers, citizen journalists and others who with to communicate news and public discourse to others via the newer digital, online mediums (blogs, websites, podcasts, etc…) in an attempt to decipher possible legal risks and liabilities that new media persons will face differently than those protected in the traditional media.
Your article brings up an interesting point about discrimination against independent online reporters and the actual event hints at possible ways that traditional media news organzations might attempt to protect their exclusives in the future, which leads to questions of how far they might go to preserve those exclusives.
Then again, I might be super-suspicious because I’m in law school.
If you have any comments regarding whether or note and to what degree bloggers are the “to be” new journalists in the near future, please drop me a line. I’m looking for informative leads that can help highlight key issues that future citizen and online reporters will face.
Thanks,
Gilbert Ye
gye@ku.edu
I take it you’re referring to this article about bloggers being denied access to events.
This is just my two cents, but I don’t think bloggers are going to become the “to be” journalists anytime soon. At least not as far as traditional news reporting goes.
Sure, there are quite a few bloggers with journalism backgrounds, but I think the vast majority of bloggers are just regular people who may not be able to reproduce news in a non-biased fashion as traditional news journalism is supposed to do.
And although more and more people get their news online every day, the majority of them are still getting their news from major news sites like CNN, Yahoo News, Google News, MSNBC, etc. I think it will be quite sometime (if ever) when the masses get their news exclusively from blogs.
The focus of ColumBlogs though isn’t necessarily on journalism and news reporting. We advocate the use of blogging as a community tool, and while one aspect of that may be sharing news updates, the goal is to promote community activism and involvement in all forms. This could include writing opinion pieces, creating online tools, maps, and utilities for organizing information, promoting meetings and gatherings for both professional and leisure activities within a community, and many other ways to get people involved.
Good luck with your research though! Let us know if we can be of any further help.