“Blogging.” they said. I thought the Journalism Department here at Rhodes University had finally flipped. At first I was confused; the image in my mind of ‘Journalism’ had always been print, radio and television. Blogging always seemed to me to be some kind of alternative medium that journalism would never really be a part of. So if it had confused me that we had to do blogging for Journalism, then there are no words for how I felt about blogging itself. Not only did I think that journalism had nothing to do with blogging, but I also thought that blogging had nothing to do with journalism. In my mind I had always pictured blogging as some sort of online medium of free expression, used only by a few fake-intellectuals, a couple of “emo kids” and an army of attention seeking teenaged girls, diarising their lives for the world to see.
I had never, as far as I knew, stumbled upon a blog with any real merit to it. I was offended; all the blogging I had ever seen seemed to be pointless ramblings, poetry and stories of all sorts and a couple of “free thinkers” with some sort of deranged message. I do not mind that people blog, but all the blogging I had seen had made me feel like Bloggers were pointless people, soulless bodies and thoughtless entities, all trying to spread some sort of arbitrary message in the laziest way possible. It looked to me as though these people spent a large part of their day, writing and rewriting their pointless thoughts until it looked like something that was supposed to be read. There appeared to be very little substance to the things they said, and, so since I had first stumbled on blogging earlier in life, I had decided to try and avoid it when possible. From then on blogging became just another arbitrary thing to me, just some symbol of nothing with an army of crazies keeping it going. The word ‘blogging’, as far as I know, never passed my lips again and never registered as “something” in my brain until the Journalism Department told us what they had up their sleeves.
The Lecturers made their case and my opinion changed quite a bit from the get go. I keep a book where I write a lot of things of my own, also arbitrary, random thoughts without much relevance to anything. But I love writing it all and it never occurred to me that I was being a hypocrite. My need to write was the driving factor behind me eventually taking the Journalism course. So to me, this would finally be the chance for me to express myself, instead of having to wrangle my way through ridiculous standards of journalistic style and form just to tell someone else’s story. So I admit: on being introduced to the kinds of blogs out there, my opinion of bloggers, and blogging as a form of Journalism, very quickly changed. Blogging and Journalism were finally looking like something I could get along with, and my confusion and disgust at the idea quickly turned to excitement.
The first term of Journalism was a bit of schlep. It was fun and interesting, but there were certain ways to write everything, there were seemingly endless sets of rules. That is not to say that blogging has no form, blogging just seems to me to have a much more free form. If I felt like it, I was finally allowed to express my own opinion. I did not feel the need to abide by such strict rules of objectivity; I could draw on my own life experiences to make a point (or lack thereof). Fuck, look, the Journalism Department can not even beat me down for writing in the first person, in fact, for once, they have insisted on it. I am still not sure whether swearing flies though, but that is just me expressing myself.
To feel like I had escaped from the strict forms we were using was, and still is, a big relief. I am not the kind of person that wants to sit and knit-pick about grammar and form when it is the story or opinion itself that should be important, and I think many journalists and Journalism students forget this most of the time.
Speaking of Journalism students, we were divided up into groups when this blogging thing began. We did not have any say in who went where, but it all worked out for the best. Even as a group, that had to decide very specific things for our blog, we still had far more freedom to do what we chose than we had in the first term. The people I worked with might not be the same people that I hang around with everyday, but after spending so much time with them and witnessing for myself the ways in which the ideas we all had bounced off each other, I would be perfectly happy if they were.
Despite our differences, it was easy to get along with them, especially when the photo comic had to be done. It was these differences that made it all work. Each of us has our own way of thinking, each of us with our own thoughts and each with our own ideas and areas where we excel. It was awesome to watch the way that our minds became a giant melting pot of ideas and to see the way that the story, the characters and the plot came together was definitely a worthwhile experience. And what is even more worthwhile was how I learned to express my own creativity within a group context. I learned that you can learn a lot about people when you get the chance to pick at their brains. And I had a fair amount of brain picking to do.
Talking to my friends and acquaintances helped me piece together the necessary story ideas and I was more than happy to hear it when a very good friend of mine allowed me to write about her for my profile article. Admittedly my writing turned out sloppy, because I was forced back into the style parameters of journalism, but the fact that journalism gave me the chance to wander through her brain to find an angle for the profile, meant I learned a lot more about her in the process. But journalism and blogging got even better as the assignments came and went.
The photo comic, the opinion piece and this reflexive piece, are by far the most fun I have had doing “journalistic work”. These are the assignments that I have enjoyed doing the most because it was finally a chance for me to express my own thoughts. There may have been genre restrictions that I had to adhere to, but for once, they bordered on the kind of writing and creativity that I am used to being able to use to express myself with. They have given me the chance to experience my own trains of thought as actual journalistic pieces, and have let me give a proverbial “fuck you” to the normal restrictions (all be they necessary for serious journalism) of the Journalism Department. That is: “fuck you” to the restrictions, not the Journalism Department itself. The journalism and blogging together allowed me to overstep the ethical boundaries such as objectivity and the lack of freedom of expression that are so strictly adhered to in every subject all year round. It has occurred to me that without blogging being introduced as part of the course, I may never have gotten to say any of this.
BUT, although I feel that both journalism and blogging are a worthwhile endeavour, I do not necessarily agree that they should be combined. Blogging, I have found is far more about saying what you want to say, whereas journalism still looks to me like writing what everyone else wants to see. Blogging, even as part of the journalism course, left me with a feeling of far more freedom. Blogging and journalism are opposites in my opinion, and I will not deny that the combination of the two has taught me a lot about myself and others, but I think that blogging should be seen as a medium for free thought and expression, and should remain completely devoid of journalistic ethics and standards. If journalistic standards, procedures, styles and forms were to somehow take over blogging entirely, the world would be a much more uninteresting place for everyone, and the loss of such an outlet for pure thought would be a great loss for all of humanity. Journalism and blogging work well together, but never at any point should the standards of one be imposed on the other. Creativity and news are separate, and I believe they should remain as they are.
