Niche Journalism

By Bryan Berlin on 10/09/2009

I was talking to my friend on AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) the other night when suddenly the Internet stopped working. Or at least I thought it was the Internet. Moments later my friend called up telling me he got kicked off AIM. That's when I realized I had not lost Internet, but just AIM. It was a strange phenomenon that we both encountered, and the first thing I did was check Twitter. Tons of other people had the same problem.

In the world of instant gratification that we live in today, news is becoming so much easier to read through blogs and websites like Twitter. While these two main Internet outlets do give us news, it is important to point out that these people are not journalists. Or are they? They are publishing events and stories that are taking place as they are happening. News stories break on Twitter before CNN has any idea what is going on. There is a constant news team on call 24/7 in every part of the world that is waiting to update the world on the next big story. Or what shoes they decided to wear today. Regardless, these bloggers and tweeters are running wild with the next big story with no journalist accreditation whatsoever.

So if news stories are being broken via Twitter and blog sites, do these publishers have a responsibility to tell people they are journalists when they write articles or publish tweets? Friendly conversations can instantly be turned into online stories with the click of a button, and news can break in 140 characters or less. Almost any person with any kind of media recognition (yes, even the president) has to watch what they say at any given moment because they never know who is pulling out their phones to report the story.

Sure, AIM shutting down across the board for 3 or 4 minutes isn't exactly going to be a front-page story or even make the news in general, but everyday citizens still are able to report that news to the public. Thousands of citizen reporters create extreme niches where anyone can find the news they are looking for. There are blogs about almost anything that report on regular news in that niche that newspapers would easily overlook on a daily basis because of the big story. Yes, Twitter may break a huge story every once in a while (like the plane that crash landed on the Hudson), but these outlets are more created to allow people to write about a topic that they love, which allows other lovers of that topic to get information. I never would have guessed that one day there would be a place that specifically focused on cats wearing costumes, but the Internet seems to have changed my expectations of the world as news.

[Additional Photos: "Twitter" twitter.com, 2009]