BLOGS.CBS 01/02/05 10:24 PM-DLR   1:44
The Osgood File.  Sponsored by ________.  This is Dave Ross.  On the CBS Radio Network.
It's the age of the blog - when the way to achieve credibility as a journalist is NOT to be a journalist.
(SPOT)
The survey results are in, and 2004 was the blog arrived.  
Blog is keyboard shorthand for weblog, which is a posted log of stuff you've seen and what you think about it, written without an editor, by someone who isn't being paid.
It's what we used to call a diary.  Except it's the kind you actually WANT your little brother to read.  And all his friends too.
And just as the first Gulf War baptized CNN, and the Lewinsky scandal baptized the Drudge Report, those forged George Bush National Guard documents were what baptized the bloggers.
It was the perfect story for the blogosphere - documents that could be analyzed while sitting at a keyboard by people who know font spacing they way they know to draw breath.
And it's catching on.   A survey in November by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, found that twenty-seven percent of online adults in the US read blogs, up from 17 percent last  February.
Bloggers covered the campaign and got seats at the conventions.  Bloggers in Iraq file reports unencumbered by the competition that often forces paid reporters to ignore the small stories for the spectacular ones.   And they report at length, with more pictures than newspapers can possibly print.
And there are thousands of them.  Unregulated, of varying quality and credibility.  So many that eventually, there'll be a neeed for blog snippers to cut and paste the best ones together.  And soon they'll get sick of doing it for free so we'll need blog salesmen to sell blog ads to pay the blog staff, and then someone will say, HEY suppose we print this up so people can read it on a bus, until in ten years we will have replaced the newspaper ... with the newspaper!   Except we'll call it a blog wrapper, or cyber fiber, or some other stupid-sounding name.
The Osgood File.  Dave Ross.  On the CBS Radio Network.
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