The relationship between the blogs that I read and the New York Times is an interesting one. When I first read the prompt I was doubtful that I was going to be able to pull any strings to make a connection between them. After I reread the question multiple times I began to realize that while the blogs and the New York Times might not have any direct connection, they do interact with each other within the press sphere.
The New York Times is obviously part of the press. And the blogs that I follow (Treehugger and FiveThirtyEight) are also part of the press but they also incorporate other parts of the sphere into them. This makes the blog more dynamic than the Times. For instance, the New York Times is a newspaper. Newspapers do not leave much room for discussion. The news is presented in story form and we read it to extract what knowledge we can from it. But the blogs on the other hand invite discussion. They encourage the debate between the readers and the writers. They entice the highly opinionated by offering the an opportunity to voice their thoughts. In this sense I think that the blogs and the Times compliment each other well. The Times provide us we the information we need, as do the blogs. And then opinions are posted on the blog. This opinions are then discussed through comments or other blogs. This interaction allows people to affect the news that is being read.
I have also noticed that while the New York Times covers a plethora of topics daily, blogs generally are more focused. They often zero-in on a particular subject such as the environment or politics. This one topic aspect of the blog allows the blogs to delve more deeply into the subject matter which can provide with even more information than we could have gathered simply reading the New York Times.
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Very true about the broad-topic-featuring newspaper verses the narrow-focus trend in blogging, though I do believe there are always blogs with a wide focus and printed texts with a narrow focus. Also, could it not be said that the Times tends to show partiality towards a specific gear of headlines, mostly politics and business-related? What if I happened to think that clock-making was the most important thing in the world. Why the hell, I might ask, doesn't the Times ever talk about clock-making? It's true that political discussion is relevant to a far wider reading audience than clock-making, but it still must be said that the Times isn't completely immune to the tendency of focusing on one kind of issue--politics and economy and big-deal sorts of issues. I think it works well that way. In reality, if the headline was about clockmaking, hardly anyone would care and they'd lose readers. Who cares about clockmaking?
ReplyDeleteGood point, though!
For you both, the most interesting thing I could find on clock making:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.longnow.org/clock/