Blogging & the New Press-Sphere

With the first reading of these articles, comparing Andrew Sullivan’s ‘Why I Blog’ and Jeff Jarvis’ ‘The Press Becomes the Press-Sphere’ seemed that it would be a rather difficult task since one focuses on various aspects of blogging and the other on how the press and news is changing. However, some fundamental ideas and viewpoints are similar between the two.

A similarity that I noticed between Sullivan's idea of blogging and Jarvis' model of the press sphere is their attribution of continual updates and immediacy to the news, even if it is through different mediums — blogs and newspapers. Sullivan discusses how blogging is an "in the moment" type of reporting in a sense. Bloggers write as the news occurs, with less revision and editing than would occur in a newspaper article. Jarvis portrays the "new press-sphere" as also being continual, but in some different ways than blogging. In Jarvis' blog, he says "Now a story never begins and it never ends...But the story itself — in whatever medium — is merely a blip on the line, a stage in a process, for that process continues after publication."

Jarvis' model of the me-sphere seemed to be accurate. It listed all of the ways I could think of that we get the news. The size of the circles containing each individual way we obtain the news also seemed to be a correct model of the amount each is employed. The largest circle was the "peers" source, which, in our class we determined was an increasingly common source of the news for us.

Overall, I believe that even though the two articles were fairly different, the authors had some of the same ideas on news and the transformations that have taken place with new technologies and ways to obtain and spread the news.