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Nowadays, new media platforms like blogs are able to inform the public more efficiently.

Blogs can be written and edited independently, which gains the quality of their information. While mainstream media, such as televisions and newspapers, is inevitably controlled by either big company or the government according to the political economy media theory. So old media intends to pick up and edit news in the way they or their owners want to present. They can never stand neutral and provide neutral information to the public. However, many bloggers are willing to challenge by targeting on answering the questions raised in newspapers, commenting and critiquing mainstream coverage (Russell etc., 2008: 68). The famous example is the P2P Diebold investigations. The network reported the inadequacy and corruptibility of Diebold Election Systems voting machines (Russell etc., 2008: 68). While the elite media was busy on some campaign’s publicity, bloggers had already raised a revolution of voting machines policy. Besides this case has also proven that the collaborative resource of blogs is more accountable than the institutional resource of old media.

Blogger Home Page. From zeald.com

Blogs hold the more powerful collective resource which gains the credibility to blogs’ information but the elite media solely depends on their journalists. Besides the common resources which they share with other media, the largest resource of blogs is the public. Since blogs are universally accessible, every individual is able to view blogs and comment on it. Thus bloggers can always obtain whole-facets information from different readers’ comments or other blogs. “None of us can know everything; each of us knows something” (Jenkins, 2006: 4). So putting what each individual knows together into the collective intelligence is powerful (Jenkins, 2006: 4). One example is the Science Blog set up by National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). NIOSH Science Blog has more than 22,000 subscribers. And in a survey, sixty percent of participants plan to continue using blog in next six months as a source of working place safety information (Sublet etc., 2011: 394). The result has shown people’s satisfactions of the information NIOSH Science Blog provides. And the resource of NIOSH Science Blog includes its completed research, viewer’s comments and other similar blogs. And due to the received comments and analyses from the public, the blog is regarded by NIOSH as a mechanism to modify their new researches.

On the other hand, not all the blogs are as popular as NIOSH’s. In fact, only a few “A-list” bloggers can obtain the majority’s attentions (Russell etc., 2008: 69). This is a side effect of the freedom of choices among tons of blog . But the merit-based process strengthens the blogs’ efficiency on information providing. Since the public is hypercritical, the blogs need to be the best on every single facet to gain and keep the popularity. Even for NIOSH Science Blog, they tend to “follow the respondents’ suggestions of expanding the topics covered in the blog” (Sublet etc., 2011: 394) and “provide a more immediate feedback mechanism” (Sublet etc., 2011: 394) to broaden the community of readers.

NIOSH Science Blog. From nanotechobserver.com

Blogs are mainly text-based and text can be proliferated rapidly. And when blogging, all a blogger needs is a computer and the internet. So it can inform public quickly after the news broke. Combined with its credibility, bloggers make a more efficient informer.

Reference:

Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old &New Media Collide. New York: NYU Press, 2006.

Adrienne Russell, Mizuko Ito, Todd Richmond and Marc Tuters, ‘Culture: Media Convergence and Networked Culture’, in Kazys Varnelis (ed.) Networked Publics, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008, pp 43-76.

Sublet, V. and C. Spring and J. Howard (2011) ‘Does Social Media Improve Communication? Evaluating the NIOSH Science Blog.’ in V. Sublet (ed.) American Journal of Industrial Medicine 54: 384-394.