In 1994 college student Justin Hall created one of the first blogs. His blog links.net is still up and running today. This blog gave the start for many more blogs to come. According to the Intergrowth’s piece “How to 10x Your Personal Brand Through Blogging” research from January 2022 shows there are “over 570 million blogs on the internet”. From 1994 to now in the 2020s the use of blogs has evolved and grown exponentially.
With the extraordinary growth in blogs also comes an extraordinary growth in the importance of blogs. Blogs have even began to trickle into the jobs of journalists.
The first step in understanding how something that started as online diaries has grown into something that now influences the way people take in news is understanding the history of the blog’s evolution. The 2007 NPR piece “The Evolution of the Blog” creates a timeline breaking down the way blogs have evolved . Some notable years that show where blogs grew in influence are 2004 and 2005. 2004 is notable because of the effect bloggers had on the 2004 election through their promotion of presidential candidates. Then in 2005 Global Voices was created as an international blogging network. Through these events Blogs became more influential in politics and global affairs.
The influence blogs now have in global affairs and politics brings up the issue how bloggers and journalists interact. I believe that blogs have had a positive impact on the journalism industry.
One positive is that journalists can use blogs to spread information and promote their writing. The piece “5 Reasons why every journalist should be blogging” from Rambling Polymath highlights some of the ways blogging is beneficial to journalists. One of the reasons was how blogs can help a journalist “build a personal brand”. A personal blog can help journalists be seen outside of their respective publications, while as the piece also mentions maintaining their audience after leaving a publication. For example, the journalist and documentarian Soledad O’Brien’s show Matter of Fact has a blog with the same name that reposts her videos and articles. Thus, giving her work more views. While also it provides a more accessible option to the public.
Blogs makes the journalism world more accessible. With countless news stations such as the New York Times, The Washington Post, and many more keeping access to their news behind a paywall, blogs – especially when made by professional journalists – become an accessible and free way to keep up to date on the news.
However, there are still some concerns about the relationship between journalism and blogs. For example, anyone can make a blog and they are not regulated in the same way a piece running in a newspaper would be. As well, blog posts usually include the writer’s opinion and are nowhere close to objective journalism. Therefore, blogs should not be a replacement for traditional journalism. Nonetheless, blogs are still positively impacting the journalist community by creating an accessible and free addition to journalism.
Blogs began as just a way to share online diary entries, but through the years they have evolved into something much more impactful and influential. The amount of influence blogs now have, especially with regards to the journalism industry, has made it more important than ever to pay attention to blogs.
Social Media in PR and Journalism 
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