How Bloggers Can Work with Mainstream News Reporters Without Stress

The explosion of knowledge in the Information Age with the advancement of the Internet and mobile telecommunication has already turned the whole world into a global village, a sort of microcosm of the macrocosm of the human community on earth as the Internet connections have broken through international boundaries and barriers to bring humans closer and nearer than ever before. You do not need to travel to the US to know what is going on moment by moment in the US once you are online. With Google search engine applications, you can virtually travel around the world within seconds and even visit people and places and chat and do whatever you wish, besides physical contact. We now see each other anytime anywhere around the world and around the clock 24/7. We do not need to spend money on traveling expenses any longer to attend conferences since we can participate and even present papers by live online teleconferencing like the popular YouTube Debates.
Without the Internet, the YouTube Debates would never have been possible.

The Internet has made the phenomenal breakthroughs in mass communication possible, blogs are the cogs in the wheel of progress of the Information Age, and no one can deny the cogency of news blogs.
Blogs in general have stopped the convolution of information and have begun the revolution for the diffusion of knowledge all over the world.

Blogs have become both personal diaries, reporter's diaries as most of the newspaper columnists are now bloggers, and their columns have been modified into blogs...
Blogs have also become so many things beyond formal categorization. Many blogs are now online convenience stores where you buy anything anytime. They are now parts of our lives and having a blog is as ordinary as having a diary or having a platform to express yourself to some people or to the rest of the world as you wish. You have the freedom of choice and the freedom of speech. As we say literally, the ball is in your court and you can kick it as you like, and as we can see, bloggers are kicking up dust in the process, stepping on toes, kicking against their pricks, and even breaking things all over the global village.

The majority of the millions of blogs are in the US, UK, France, Germany, Australia, and other countries in the developed world where the majority of the populations are Internet literates. The majority of the populations in developing countries are still clueless about blogs. In fact, most of the high school pupils and college students in Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, do not know what blogs are and the names of Blogger, Wordpress, Technorati and other popular blogging terms of reference are alien vocabulary to them.

There are less than 10 news dailies and 10 TV stations in Nigeria where over 76 million of the over 140 million people are non-literates and these mainstream news media have underdeveloped websites and are not bothered about the hullabaloo over blogs in the Western world. In fact, they regard the very few Nigerian blogs as elitist intellectual platforms for free speech. There are less than 500 Nigerian bloggers and most of them are young intellectual technocrats and members of the Nigerian literati with majority of them resident in the developed countries. The Nigerian blogs are ahead of the Nigerian news media in the application and integration of multimedia for information, education, and communication (IEC). The Nigerian blogs are as advanced as the American, European, Australian, and Asian blogs in the applications of audio-visual media such as video and audio podcasts and slides for news, current affairs, articles, stories and other writings, but the Nigerian newspapers and television stations are still underdeveloped. They are still operating in their closed circuit of the last century and the government owned Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), the so-called largest TV network in Africa generates less revenue than the TechCrunch! The NTA cannot pay salaries without the regular revenue allocation from the Federal Government of Nigeria. The Nigerian bloggers have to bridge the huge communication gap between Nigeria and the developed world by using their blogs as news channels for reports, stories, and features on Nigeria and Nigerians in the global village. The popular Nigerian news blogs are the Nigerian Times, Times of Nigeria, Nigerian Columnist, Nigerian Muse and Naija News. .

There are over 75 millions blogs as indexed by Technorati and thousands of new blogs are being created as you read this, but most of the blogs are personal diaries or scrapbooks

The blogs we are focusing on are the news blogs and their importance, relevance and significance to the news media at large.

The news media was a closed-circuit television until the Internet came and made it an open circuit television or more explicitly, a general public media. Then the blogs came to make the news media more liberated and freed from the chains of the dictatorial owners of the press. It is no longer he who pays the piper who dictates the tune, because the listeners or readers have now been given their own pipes and they can now blow their own pipes and make their own tunes anytime and anywhere. Their tunes may be discordant tunes, but you can choose to hear them or not. Bloggers have made the news media more democratic, because bloggers have made news to become news of the people, by the people for the people.

The traditional mainstream news media cannot ignore the news bloggers who have become the external organs of the modern news media and since the mainstream media cannot ignore them, they have decided to accept them as news agents and correspondents and for cogent purposes, have integrated them into their formal and normal news gathering and reporting tools.

The nearer you are to the spot of the incident or event, the better view you would have and the clearer eyewitness account you would give. That is why those who are already resident or present where the incident or event is occurring and can blog it should go ahead and blog it before the mainstream news media can report it. Before the reporter can get to the spot, the blogger on the spot would have already blogged the news. That is why the major mainstream news channels such as the CNN, BBC, Reuters, and others are now relying on the public for news. The CNN I-Report is a major leap in citizen media, because the viewers send their eyewitness accounts of incidents and events to the CNN newsroom before the reporters and correspondents can reach there and the I-Report has made the CNN to break the news before other news channels. The bloggers have become the fastest and sharpest eyewitness-reporters of breaking news in the world and the mainstream media cannot ignore bloggers, because to ignore them would be detrimental to the advancement of the news media, public enlightenment and the general diffusion of information.

News reporters do not need to lose their jobs, because of the news bloggers.
Blogging news is still different from reporting news. Blogging is not professional journalism, but an informal form of telling a story or reporting news and news bloggers who are not trained journalists still need to be trained if they have to be employed by the mainstream media. Therefore, they cannot replace professional journalists.

News from bloggers has to be proofread and edited by news reporters, because they are in most cases, still raw stuff like drafts and not camera-ready copy. So, let the news bloggers blog it, and the news reporters can still report it.

If the news blogger tells it as he or she sees it from the personal point of views, the formal news reporter should report it professionally without the common personal bias or idiosyncrasies of news bloggers, because most of the news bloggers are often ranting or raving in their news reports. They are a celebration of yellow journalism without apologies or regrets.

There are thousands of professional journalists who also blog on a regular basis as in-house bloggers for their news media. There are blogs on the websites of both the print and electronic media and journalists are blogging for the most popular blogs such as TechCrunch, Engadget, Boing Boing, Daily Kos, Powerline, Instapundit, Bayosphere, Wonkette, and the Huffington Post. These popular group blogs have become bona fide members of the news media and in fact, are not different from the mainstream news media.

The news media have become more dynamic with the expediency of news blogs and the synergy would be of immense benefit to the advancement of information, education, and communication (IEC) for the advancement of modern civilization in the 21st century.