Blogs and Trust

Lee Hopkins raised an old question in a new context in yesterday's installment of For Immediate Release. With media growing more and more dependent on bloggers for information, MSNBC's use of citizen journalists to cover the latest earthquake in Indonesia. MSNBC's decision to publish the accounts of local residents made sense, given the time it would take to get staff journalists on the ground on the remote island hardest hit by the quake. There's not much opportunity for a blogger with an agenda to abuse this particular story, but if MSNBC can call on citizen journalists to cover a quake, it's only a matter of time before other major media start tapping into the collaborative online work of citizen journalists to cover other stories. (Today, MSNBC's WordPress, the free blogging software tool, probably thought it was no big deal when they Shel Holtz is principal of a shel of my former self