Ethan Zuckerman, from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, is talking about "Media Attention in the Age of the Weblog: Will Blogs Make News More or Less Global? He starts with the role of amateur astroners in astronomical discovery — a role transformed by technology (the telescopes) and community (internet connected individuals).
Zuckerman zeros in on a subset of blogs that are affecting news creation. His particular interest is the poor reporting of developing world news in traditional media. Question: will bloggers improve coverage of developing world or will the first-world bias of many bloggers lead to a lessened focus on the developing world? ["By geeks, and for geeks."]
Comparison between Japan and Nigeria : similar populations, Nigeria is 2nd largest economy in sub-Sahara Africa, but an order of magnitude difference in CNN reporting. Galtung and Ruge (1965) explored foreign news in Norwegian papers over 2.5 years, in search of what causes foreign news to be reported.
Interesting: the more a story involves personal narrative, the more likely it is to be reported.
For the first time, in 1964, we had real-time satellite news: coverage of the Olympics in Japan. This was before digital "film" …
