racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

Yesterday afternoon, I posted a piece on Pinoy.tech.blog about my chancing into a raid (for pirated software) being conducted by local authorities on a computer/electronics shop in one of the city’s malls. While I am not a trained journalist, I did try to do some fact-checking, but it seemed my info gathering skills are not up to par with our friends in the journalism profession. So I came up empty-handed. At any rate, I posted a quick camera-phone capture, which I thought was blog-worthy enough to share.

I got in touch with Erwin Oliva from inq7.net, to see whether he had some information on recent crackdowns on pirated software (usually done by the local police’s anti-piracy task forces in cooperation with the Business Software Alliance). He told me the authorities usually did these without prior notice (of course), and will likely issue official statements after a few weeks. He got back to me after a while and confirmed that there were indeed raids conducted on two shops at the SM City North EDSA cyberzone, and this was part of the BSA’s regular coordination with the local police.

Erwin then posted a news item on inq7.net, linking back to the original PTB post within the evening.

Of course, we’ve seen this before, with inq7.net’s citing other PTB articles as well. This only shows that the relationship between blogs and mainstream media is alive and kicking. There’s probably no debate that people still see the “blogs vs. mainstream media” as an issue. But for me, it’s not really an adversarial relationship, but more of a complementary one.

After all, bloggers are fond of linking to articles on mainstream media sites (which many find very convenient). And established news outfits can also cite “citizen journalism” efforts. Then there are the journalist-bloggers (or blogger-journalists?) who blog as an alternative or complementary activity to their profession. Since there are things that cannot be said or shown in a mass medium, and since the flow of information in mainstream media is centralized and editorialized, journalists find blogs a great way of bringing to the world what they could not have otherwise published.

Here’s an interesting read on the issue. It’s quite old (dates to more than a year back), but still relevant.

Blogs will complement rather than replace traditional media. They can provide links to multiple sources and a place for readers to contribute immediate feedback. Blogs are not better than the mainstream media, but they are different. And if that extracts additional value from the mainstream media or helps keep them honest, then more power to the blogs.

Earlier yesterday, I was actually interviewed by a group of journalism students from the University of the Philippines. The topic was on podcasting, but I took the opportunity to explore the blogs and mainstream media issue as, in return, I interviewed them about their school’s and their own perspectives on blogs and blogging. And this, I shall discuss in a subsequent posting.

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