Comments on: Fancy having 500 newspaper editors as Facebook buddies?

By: The King

The King — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 07:13:06 +0000

@ comment number 2 and 3,

Blog right now do represent a small fraction of the population, but that is till now. If you look at the recent years, the number of blogs have dramatically increased.

Some things just start out small. Youtube started out pretty small and look where it is today. It’s like the word Google. Why don’t you google this? Why don’t you youtube this video.

Additionally, you have to see the increasing relationship between people and journalists as such. A 100 years ago, the only way journalists could talk to the people as such was through newspapers. Then the Telivision came making the relationship even closer. Now the internet is here bringing us even closer. If you think about it, a hundred years ago, would I be talking to David Schlesinger is Reuters Editor-in-Chief or on his blog?

By: Dave Lee

Dave Lee — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 23:51:24 +0000

I have to agree with the commenter above. Quite right he/she is. A lot of journalists — myself included — get a little carried away by the blogging scene. It’s easy to forget that really, blogs are such a teeny-tiny media source representing a teeny-tiny population of the world.

By: What is a blog?

What is a blog? — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 16:30:06 +0000

The Cairo example does not give a cross section of Egypt. You’re seeing what the technically-inclined population of Egypt worries about, not the other 10 million who don’t have access to a computer. Yes, their worries are quite different.

By: Colin

Colin — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 10:41:36 +0000

Internet penetration in Egypt was 7% in 2005, up from 0.7% in 2000. So how representative of Egyptian public sentiment generally are the Egyptian bloggerati? How many of the two million cemetery-dwellers of Cairo blog, for example?

I live in Brazil and read GVO’s coverage of the bloggerati there, and often find myself asking the same question. Often, the bloggers cited are actually columnists from local commercial press sources. In the most recent post, the coverage tracks blog reaction to the launch of a biography of a Globo pop star by a publishing house with business ties to Globo. I don’t find this particularly enlightening.

Thank you, at any rate, for (properly) disclosing that Reuters partially funds Global Voices Online. Are there other business relationships among the panel members that we ought to know about? Or are these endorsements meant to be read as independent product reviews? And have you read the report of the independent commission on BBC business jouornalism and “impartiality”?

I’m an Orkut man myself — if you wanted to cover Brazilians online, for example, you would be better off setting up a Reuters bureua there rather than on the Ilha Brazil in Second Life.

Nut then I am 45, and live in Brazil, so I guess am not the future, either!