• VantaBrandon@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    No, its called free and open because you can blog about damned near anything without getting thrown out of a window. Some small time blogs get big views so no, your premise has no merit.

    • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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      10 hours ago

      Hard disagree my friend.

      A small time blog is hardly journalism. You won’t see Joe’s blog as a reference for the news at 11.

      There’s a shitload of blogs out there, and even if they’re trying to be the “news”, it’s 99% opinion based “reporting” on blogs.

      It’s hard to compare someone’s personally owned blog with someone like Fox News, which has publications (websites, and blog-like content) as well as TV channels and webcast videos, both audio and video content available in every location where people consume news.

      Unless it’s the largest blog to ever exist, it likely won’t hold a candle to the media giants that run most news organizations.

      I get what you’re saying here friend, but no.

      • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net
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        10 hours ago

        I agree about regular news, but a niche subset of this are blogs by academics, which straddle the line between academic writing work and news. I’m thinking of stuff like https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/ , a blog with multiple authors, but I am most familiar with Andrew German. They have a blogroll with many other examples.

        A specific example of what I mean is that a while back, there was a big hub-bub about the shocking discovery of potentially arsenic based life. Turns out that this revelation was based on shoddy science and a dash of non-academic press picking up the exciting headline. A pretty thorough debunking was done on Rosie Redfield’s blog, where the quality of the scientific analysis is good, but is more opinionated than you’d typically find in a published paper(which can be good in some scenarios). This led to a bizarre situation where later news retrospectives of the hype did actually rely on Redfield’s blog as a reference.

        Of course, this is still incredibly niche, and I think this subsection of blogs only end up like this because of the informal peer review networks that you get when a bunch of scientists make blogs, but I find it cool and interesting nonetheless.