The New York Times vs. The Blogs I'm Following

I guess I will start by comparing the sports blog I am following and the New York Times first since this comparison is probably a little simpler. There is only so much going on in sports, so a lot of the blog posts and The New York Times articles are very similar. For example, right now the World Series in baseball is going on, so when I first open both pages, there is a headline article about it right at the top of each. Then they both have other similar stories of interest, maybe about this week’s matchups in football or basketball. But there are also many differences in the blog and The New York Times. First of all, The New York Times is more forward with its stories. They tell it how it is and that is it, while the blog sort of gets into opinions. Another difference between the two is that the blog, for the most part, only talks about major sports, such as professional and college football, basketball, and baseball. Then there is also some hockey and soccer and some of the less watched, but still popular, sports. The New York Times, however, talks about things such as horse racing, marathon running, and has things from international sports.

Then, the political blog that I am following has posts very similar to the articles of The New York Times. As a matter of fact, when I opened The New York Times political page a few minutes ago it a headline about the health care bill. Then, when I opened the blog, one of the first posts I saw was an article about the exact same thing. The difference I have noticed between the blog and The New York Times, and its not just this article, is the tone each uses. The blog I am following is a conservative one, and on an article such as the health care bill, it will probably be more pessimistic since they are somewhat against it. But The New York Times is more towards the middle or maybe even a little liberal, so on an article about the healthcare bill, it will tend to be a little more positive.

Comparing Jarvis and Sullivan

When connecting Jeff Jarvis’s post about the press-sphere and Andrew Sullivan’s post about why he blogs, it’s easy to notice how blogging can be considered one of the new ways of getting news. In Jarvis’s first model, he shows the news use to be, with all the news being filtered through the press before being released to us. But then in the next models, he shows how the press isn’t the only way to get news anymore. Blogging could be considered one of those new ways of getting news. Blogging is not something that is filtered through some kind of press; a person just puts the information on the internet and its there for everyone to read, whether it is true or not.

Blogging is sort of the opposite of what the last chart that Jarvis put in his post explains; the timeline of the process of a news story. In that chart it shows how the story is gathered and put together, then published. But a blog doesn’t go through a process like the chart shows. A blog is posted for the world to see without being edited or revised.

In the New Press-Sphere model, there are many different things that Jarvis has contributing as the source of our news, including work, government, peers, and many more. And though he doesn’t specifically have blogging as one of those sources, I believe it can fit in different ways with a few of them. Like I mentioned, blogging is not edited or revised, it is just someone putting information on the internet and its up to you to believe it or not. This is very similar to getting your news from peers and word of mouth. When someone tells you something, you just have to believe them since you have no way to confirm what they are saying. But what a blog has that word of mouth doesn’t are links. On most blogs, you can read the information they have, and then they will have a link posted so you can check it out for yourself. And both peers and links are part of the chart for the New Press-Sphere.

Jeff Jarvis and His Press-Sphere

From what I understand after reading Jeff Jarvis’s blog post called “The Press Becomes the Press-Sphere”, is that in the past the news use to simply come from the press. Something would happen and the press would turn into a story and release it to the public. But now, that process has been completely altered. Now, according to Jarvis, our news comes from many different sources besides the press, including the government, peers, and many more sources. With all these new sources, it is changing the way the news is presented. With all these sources, there can be many different views, opinions, or takes on the same story.
But when it comes to the whole article itself, I was pretty confused the whole time I was reading. I’m not sure if he was saying the press-sphere is better or worse than the old way of reporting the news and then he had a lot more charts that just added to the confusion. I was especially confused with the chart for the new news process; it was just a bunch of arrows and words pointing in different directions. I also can’t tell if in the new press-sphere model and the me-sphere model, some of the circles that the words are in are bigger than others for a reason. He really needed to explain his models. Then towards the end, he had a bulleted list of some points, but some of them came off as positive and some came off as being negative so that was also confusing. Sorry this is a short post but I just don’t have too much to say on this reading.

Experience of The New York Times

My experience of reading the New York Times has not been as terrible as I expected. Normally I hate reading stuff like this unless it is something that I am really interested in, but now that I have been regularly looking at it, I have noticed that there are a lot of small random stories, that I would normally overlook, that have been catching my attention and are actually interesting. Sure, there are sometimes when you open the page and the main story is about a woman who raises chickens and that is surrounded by politics and the healthcare reform, but if you navigate around, you are bound to find something that is interesting. Something I don’t like about the New York Times website though is that I feel it is too repetitive, like it always has headlines about the same old stuff and it gets really old. They did have the article about the lady raising chickens I mentioned in the headlines though, but I feel that didn’t exactly deserve to be there.

As far as the New York Times influencing my other reading and writing habits, I don’t think it has happened yet. We have only been following it for about a week now and I think if it’s going to influence the other things I read and write it is going to take longer than that. I do feel better though that I know more that is going on and when my dad now starts to talk about something to me about politics, I may have a clue what he is talking about and maybe I can actually carry on a conversation about it with him. So I guess in that sense it has influenced my interactions.

Blog Analysis

The first blog I am going to analyze is the blog I chose to follow myself and it is called SB Nation. This is a website for sports blogs and I chose it because sports are something that interests me. There are many authors of this blog site and they all post news about sports as it happens. The way the blog is set up is very user friendly. On the home page, it has posts for all sports and those are usually the main headlines and most interesting stories. Then, at the top of that page, you can actually click and read posts for a particular sport, including posts about fantasy sports. Also, you can select a particular team and read posts only on that team. The audience for this blog site is basically any sports fan or someone seeking advice for their fantasy team. Its purpose is to keep people informed on the constant breaking news happening in the world of sports.

The second blog, which is the one I had to choose from the list, is instapundit. This is a political blog written with a conservative slant. The set up of this blog site is different than any other I have seen. Most of the pages usually have the actual blog posts in a small column on the left third of the screen while the other two thirds of the screen are filled with other headlines and links. This page is the exact opposite, the left two thirds of the page are the actual posts and the right third is the headlines and links. The main author of this blog is Glenn Reynolds and he is a law professor at the University of Tennessee and also writes some for the magazine, Popular Mechanics. The audience of this blog I would guess is mainly conservatives who want to hear politics and a lot about technology. A lot of the posts have a humorous twist to them too. I would say the purpose of this blog is to inform people on current issues going on in the world from technology to politics.