Can blogs restore faith in journalism?

Much of the first chapter of Dan Gillmor’s We The Media, felt, at times, a bit like old news. As journalism students, particularly students at a school whose administration loves buzzwords like “convergence” and “cross-platform storytelling,” we frequently hear about many of the themes Gillmor outlines in the chapter, such as the corporatization of news, the opportunities and shortcomings of citizen journalism and the concept of journalism as a conversation, rather than the top-down processed news of our parents’ generation.
It was interesting, however, to note Gillmor’s primary argument that “personal journalism is not a new invention” and learn more about some of the pioneers, such as John Markoff of The New York Times, Tim Berners-Lee and Justin Hall, who helped bring the concept into the 20th century. The world that these pioneers have created—and we, as citizens have created, as Time magazine’s 2006 “Person of the Year” choice would suggest—perhaps raises more questions than answers about the future of the news media, questions the industry has been needing to ask itself for a long time. For example, Gillmor speaks of a media climate increasingly controlled by the demands of Wall Street and dictated by the public hunger for celebrity news. He speaks of an era, though, in which “news divisions of the major networks lost money but were nevertheless seen as the crown jewels for their prestige…” Will the bloggers bring back such an era? Is it up to the bloggers, the citizen journalists, and the oft-partisan voices unfettered by the economic and logistical constraints of big media to bring back the days when journalism was a means to inform, expose and provide a public service vital to the survival of American democracy? Will history remember Matt Drudge and Arianna Huffington as the Walter Cronkite of Generation X? And, if so, what are the consequences? These are questions Gillmor does an OK job of raising, but doesn’t attempt to answer. I’d be curious to read the rest of the book…