Are blogs merely distractions?

During Spring Break I watched a very interesting interview with The CNN Chief International Correspondent, Christiane Amanpour. She was talking to a university crowd about the state of news reporting.

What really caught my attention was when the audience was allowed to ask the questions. One student asked Amanpour about her thoughts on what has been termed citizen journalism. Her response made me think about the difference between reporting news from all over the world and writing about it in the security of your own home, after someone else has brought an issue to your attention.

The essence of what Amanpour said was that while citizen journalism has its moments, most of it serves as distractions from what “the real news” is. It seems that she views citizen journalism as interfering with the type of news coverage she does and I can see her point. As a trained and highly qualified journalist you obviously are critical of blogs that often merely present one person’s interpretation of a news story. However, if you choose to see much of citizen journalism as a supplement to “the real news” I still would argue that it does more good than harm. It all simply comes down to being critical of any information you are presented with.

Another point Amanpour made was that citizen journalism seldom has broken any big stories. Again I see where Amanpour, a journalist who has travelled the world, is coming from. No one sitting in front of their laptop in an American suburb can really know what is going on in Africa at that time. However a blogger who actually is in Africa at that time can, and maybe he or she can even get the story out before a big network like CNN.

I think that we still have to regard most of citizen journalism as a commentary to the news more than the news itself. And as a commentary or supplement I think we are doing pretty well.