A backwards move for blogging.

Wednesday 17 February 2010

I knew it. I knew as soon as I saw that we would be doing a blogging assignment that'd it'd be a step backwards for me.

I've kept my personal blog on Livejournal for several years and when I saw that we were to do a blogging assignment I was thrilled. Overjoyed that I was gonna be tested on something I loved. So I decided to buck up my ideas a bit. I started a proper (mildly journalistic) blog on Blogger (though as you see I've now moved it over to Wordpress) because I needed to write blogs that didn't include so many "lols" "wtfs" and "omg there's this guy in my seminar who wears really tight trousers". Even though I still write a huge pile of drivel it's now more of a blog than a diary.

But no. Apparently that's not good enough. Suddenly, having had a blog before being giving this assignment is a disadvantage. I've been told to set up yet another blog because it has to be (inexplicably) started today when the assignment was set. Are you kidding me? You want us to be journalists off our own backs? You talk about blogging having no gateways? But by these standards we are only allowed to blog when you say so. This is actually ridiculous. It's stupid. This is journalism... it should be one of the most up to date courses on the university curriculum. Surely it should be the assumption that your students already have blogs? Not that it's an entirely new thing that we're learning.

There is absolutely no good reason why I shouldn't be able to carry on using this blog. It's not as if it has a backlog of thousands of entries. It's not like it's my personal diary. It's my blog that I set up in acknowledgement that I'd be doing an assessment on blogging.

Suddenly I've become incredibly restricted in something I love. My passion for journalism is about new media, social media, the idea that anyone can get their opinion out of the internet, the fact that I talk to people across the globe. The internet is the most wonderful example of free speech but somehow, somehow this has been has been completely ignored.

I've never lost so much faith in journalism as I have today.

3 comments:

Tara said...

this makes me sad :( and slightly angry that they wont let you carry on your blog xxx

A backwards move for blogging. « A Backwards Move said...

[...] left the lecture theatre and immediatly wrote this entry in my normal blog. I knew it. I knew as soon as I saw that we would be doing a blogging assignment [...]

A backwards move for blogging. said...

[...] left the lecture theatre and immediatly wrote this entry in my normal blog. I knew it. I knew as soon as I saw that we would be doing a blogging assignment [...]

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