Society - Written Friday, November 27, 2009 by Gautam Lamba - 6 Comments

Journalism coming full circle?

When talking about the impact of Web 2.0 on the newsmedia and journalism, there is a tendency to view blogs, search engines, wikis etc as disruptive technologies that have shaken up an age old order. I would argue that is not at all true, in fact, I would argue that the now commonplace blogs, wiki and citizen journalism concepts are Web 2.0 tools that are returning journalism to where it began…the crowd.

Observing and discussing the events of everyday life has been in existence for a long while. In the Mughal courts, Akbar held a Diwan-i-Aam, where the common man was more or less free to put forth their concerns and hear about the rules that governed them. In fact up until, newspapers arrived in the seventeenth century (Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien,1605) reporting and observation were simultaneous and were the purview of the general public. Continue…