Blogs and News Online

By Winnie Wong Sing Yih 49427

1. News blog-Xujinglei (http://blog.sina.com.cn/xujinglei)

2. An online only newsite-Yahoo (https://www.yahoo.com/news/)
3. An online counterpart of a print newspaper-The guardian 

Here comes the digital generation when anyone can be a writer, journalist, reporter, editors and broadcaster without even a formal or traditional platform. Of course, it’s online. The brand new way to deliver news and information on blogosphere or media sphere has created a new fashion among our generations. It is also undeniably quick where bloggers and online news site can respond to happenings and issues.  However, has these flooding online information  really provided an unbiased, clear and real version of news or even good influences to us?

Xu Jing Lei’s blog biography

I believe that what constitutes good practices in online news has to be real and unbiased. If the content for public has included personal perceptions and interest, the outcome would be misleading. According to The Gurdian (2008), Xu Jing Lei, a China actress, director, writer who began her blog in 2005 “I got the joy of expressing myself” hits 11.5 million visits within a few months. A statistician at Technorati revealed that her blog was the most popular in world. The highlight of her blog is about showing her real self instead of a glamour celebrity’s life. Behind the scene, she showed her positive lifestyle and proved the ability of woman to make a difference which is exactly what audience look for. This spirit has successfully influence many people as reflected on the blog’s visit. Most bloggers solicit feedback, fostering two-way communication between readers and authors. Readers can provide feedback by leaving comments on the blog page itself or by posting a response on their own blogs and linking back to the original post (trackback). To the extension of comment of blogs, it usually depends on bloggers tolerance. Bloggers actually have the rights to delete, defend, and close the comment section of readers. Although personal blogs might inspire us in certain level, it is still too narrow to be single source of information.

On the other hands, Yahoo News as a hybrid online-only news site, which do a mix of aggregation and original reporting do provide a huge amount and variation of news from different source. Besides immediately accessible and convenient, Yahoo also offers a multi-lingual interface which available in over 20 languages is being friendly to people using different languages. A research done by Nielsen, comScore and Hitwise (as cited in PewReserach Centre, 2011) showed that Yahoo is the top ranking news website among others popular websites for average monthly audience. Readers are allowed to comment on the news and the space even rank the neutrality of comment from readers for others consideration. It is really interesting that a news website provide a function like social media. The information is clear and outstanding. Which means, readers are given a wide extend of comments’ content but the level of neutrality will be justified by the website. However, news in Yahoo.com usually include pop-out advertisements, video clips and bombastic title to attract audience but it might be distractive sometimes. Besides, variety  of sources may lead to unverified news source and triggered confusion since some news content do not even state where  the source came from.

Nevertheless, The Guardian is the only British daily newspaper which is printed in full colour and was the first to use the Berliner format for its main section with. As well as Yahoo, The Guardian also has online news site and its’ online edition also was the fifth most widely read in the world in October 2014, with over 42.6 million readers. The good practice of The Guardian apparently would be its consistency in qualities. It provides regular content and features with neat layout which easy to read and search news. The Guardian has taken so call a very "open" stance in delivering news, and has launched an open platform for their content. The comment section does not directly appear on the main page obviously but as readers' comments and responses are featured at “comment is free” section. Censorship is exercised by Moderators who can ban posts which has no right of appeal and by those who they feel have overstepped the mark. The traditional news production line to new media production must have limitations on certain performance. In fact, the website version did not provide enough extent for readers to comment much will increase the amount of passive readers.

In short, I still encourage readers to encounter print newspaper with online counterpart. This is due to a solid foundation of printing version and consistency of news’ quantity and quality. Furthermore, news of printed news usually came from reliable source and is everlasting and unchanging, whereas random news articles can be hidden away on an online website by the author anytime. May we all celebrate the hard work, influence and contributions of news and leave fake news alone.

References

PewResearch Centre. (2011). The top 25. Retrieved from http://www.journalism.org/2011/05/09/top-25/

The Gurdian. (2008). The world’s 50 most powerful blogs. Retrieved from  https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/mar/09/blogs