Internet giant Yahoo has put blogs on an equal footing with news. The company has included blogs on all its news searches giving a major boost to personal journals that aim to compete with traditional journalism.
The company said in a statement that starting immediately, computer users who conduct a search on Yahoo News "will receive mainstream news stories along with blogs." Yahoo's move also incorporates content from its service called Flickr that includes blogs and other personal content such as photos that users post for sharing, as well as blogs.
"By incorporating grassroots journalism from all around the globe into news search results, consumers can now enjoy opinions, analysis and commentary, via blogs, and related photos from the Flickr community that provide a visual context to breaking news as reported by everyday people," the company said.
"The addition of grassroots news sources into Yahoo! News Search is another example of Yahoo! using world-class technology to deliver relevant content to our audiences," said Joff Redfern, director of product at Yahoo! Search. "Yahoo! News has become the leading online news destination by continually providing the most comprehensive service to our users, and news search technology is a critical piece of our overall news offering." He argued, "Traditional media doesn't have the time and resources to cover all the stories. It really does add substantially to what you are looking at when you are looking for news."
Yahoo has created a three-tier system for finding news that starts with the links to top ten stories and related photographs produced by mainstream news organisations on the main Yahoo News site. Readers searching for further details will be taken to a second-level news site, which splits the page between news from 6,500 professional sources and links to the hundreds of thousands of blogs available from its syndication service.
Thus, the expanded search stops short of blurring all lines between edited news and self-publishing. "We do try to demarcate what is mainstream media and what is user-generated content so that there is no confusion there," Redfern said. But the blogging community, or "blogosphere," also is filled with rumors and inaccuracies.
While the traditional media still faces the same problems, professional newsrooms ostensibly have more checks and balances to guard against incorrect or unsubstantiated information from being published. That distinction is one of the reasons why Yahoo is listing its blog results in a box separated from the roughly 6,500 "trusted" news sources tracked by its search engine, Redfern pointed out.
The move is expected to stoke the debate between media traditionalists who want to maintain strict walls between news and commentary and those who argue such boundaries are elitist and undervalue the work of "citizen journalists."
Pete Clifton, editor of the BBC News website, thinks blogs have a valuable role to play. "Embracing the value of what people know, and what they are saying, should be central to the proposition of any news site these days," he said. "Giving readers easy access to what is being said by bloggers is another way of doing this. I don't believe blogs will eclipse trusted sources of news journalism like the BBC, but the two things can live very happily together, as long as readers are clear which is which," he added.
On the other hand, Google Inc, which runs the Internet's leading search engine, so far has treated blogs differently. The California-based company last month introduced a specialty search engine that does nothing but sift through blogs. Google's news section continues to focus on material from mainstream media (MSM).
So where does it leave one? John Burke wrote in editorsweblog: with the popularity of Yahoo News and the depth that its aggregator now provides the curious reader through easy search and linking, more direct competition between MSM and blogs could result in a news atmosphere more based on trust. For example, who do you trust more; any random blogger sitting in his basement commenting on Iran's nuclear situation, the journalist designated by a large brand-name media company to report on it, or an expert in Middle Eastern nuclear proliferation who happens to have his own blog?
