David Akin auf die Frage von Jay Rosen: Inwiefern ihn das Bloggen als Journalist verändert hat. (Vollständiges Interview hier):

David Akin: It hasn't, I'm afraid to say. What has changed me as a journalist is the Internet.

And I think it's important to realize that, as you and others try to end that irrelevant bloggers vs. journalists debate, the Internet is really the thing that has changed everything. It's the Internet that has empowered citizen journalists.

Before we had blog publishing systems, we had relatively easy-to-use Web page creation tools--anyone remember Tripod?--and listservs and chat rooms. The blog form, of course, is a tremendous improvement on many of these tools. But, really, the challenge that many bloggers believe they are taking to mainstream media were challenges that predated the blog form; they were caused by widespread use of the Internet.

Let me take that a bit further. The so-called blog challenge to mainstream journalism could not have existed without Archie and Gopher and all the depositories of online artifacts of the early Internet. That's because the blogs that are challenging mainstream thinking are blogs full of links. Someone had to create those things to link to. (Oddly, most often, they are links back to mainstream media.) The best blogs link to primary documents and primary sources. But most bloggers (and many journalists, for that matter) have trouble distinguishing primary sources from secondary sources.

E-mail, the Web browser, and always-on, wireless high-speed Internet connections are doing way more to "change me" as a journalist. With those tools, I can find new voices and new sources faster and that, I'm sure, improves the quality of my work.

[Quelle: David Akin of CTV in Canada: It's Not the Blog. It's the Net. via Jay Rosen - PressThink ]