What's Objectivity?

Thomas Crampton wrote an excellent piece about Blogging vs. Journalism.  One point Thomas made was of great interest to me:

"Opinions: Blog postings work best with strong opinions in them. This is problematic for a journalist because we are supposed to avoid that. You can often get the same effect, however, by asking sharp questions."

With so many journalists turned bloggers, are we getting more objective reporting, or less?  When I visit a blog, I look for analysis, commentary, and reflections; not pure facts.  Does this inherently make it more subjective?  I believe so - and that's why I visit blogs.

When I read the NYT's, I find it "objective"; but on reflection, that's probably because I align with them politically.  There are millions of people who'd tell me NYT's is the most biased newspaper on the planet.  Same with blogs - If you like what you read, you'd think of them as less-biased.  Granted, of course, that the analysis is reasonable...  There are, after all, many ways to skin a cat (where does this gross idiom come from?!).  or... many roads to Rome.

Food for thought: Will the fragmentation of media lead to individuals that are more close-minded?  Now that we can pick and choose what suits us best...

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[Ingrid]

V. interesting and timely subject. One more reason to keep a tab on your blog!

On the whole, I think blogging, by nature, is different from journalism. While the latter stresses objectivity, the former is, as you put it, "inherently" opinionated or subjective. Moreover, within blogsphere, there's a garden variety: some blogs - gawker.com springs to mind - that are primarily "reporting" (mostly media gossips and celeb news, such as let's go do some Kate Moss) with an editorial slant. Huffington Post so far seems to live up to its grandiose claim of "delivering news and opinions" after the initial hoopla.

The majority of blogs are fairly self-interest (politics, business or personal interest, among others) driven and therefore "subjective" by journalism standards. The widely read andrewsullivan.com is a case in point. It started out as a Sullivan Column on mainly (conservative) politics and social issues (gay rights) but has metamorphosed into a hodgepodge of email bags from readers and editorials on current affairs. In other words, it's become less attractive than it was in its early days.

But then you could argue that Sullivan makes the best of blog's interactivity by providing a platform for readers to voice their opinions, and a very clever way, in my view, to keep them hooked.

In a broad context, you ask the weighty question - I believe it's human nature to look for companies that reinforce your own views, however biased they may be, since we invariably view the world through our own prisms. Which leads to the question of whether blogsphere could one day replace newspapers, which are still considered by most as fairly objective factual reporting. What we need is 'fair and balanced' (the irony of Fox News apparently is not lost on us) reporting and analysis. The rest is up to us.

If I were to venture a guess about the future of blogsphere, I would have to say that eventually we'll see a mirror image of what print media are today: segmentation.