By Alusine Fullah
Hundreds they sit arguing: journalists are more powerful than bloggers. Verse versa. A lot of people have been trying to figure out the difference between bloggers and journalist. There seems to be a feeling among some that bloggers are less important than journalist. Others feel journalists are behind the times.
The debate around who is a journalist is most often framed as the conflict between bloggers and journalists. Although to some extent, it sound obsolete, but the dichotomy remains a benchmark of the debate. The distinction between formal and informal journalism still remains sharp.
Blog is an abbreviation of weblog or originally a log of daily life, information and material collected online, usually by an amateur. The word and practice have changed considerably, but “blogger” is still used to refer to a casual or unprofessional online content producer, and contrasted with the professional journalist.
When writing any piece of content, it’s essential to keep the audience in mind. Journalists and bloggers often times have slightly different end goals in terms of audience targeting. News articles tend to appeal to broad audiences for a short amount of time to generate buzz within a given industry. Blogs, on the other hand, are typically more narrowly focused on niche audiences within an industry.
The interesting part of the definition to keep in mind is the idea that a blog is personal. Also the definition doesn’t say anything about fact or bias. You could say that a blog does not need to be the full truth; instead it could be “reflections” and “comments.”
So in the end the only true definition of a blogger is someone that writes a blog. It’s an online journal that a writer can use to share his ideas and thoughts. Therefore, a blogger is someone that writes his ideas and thoughts online.
