Karl of Philly future and I discussed at the meetup yesterday the relative journalistic merits of newspapers and blogs, both how they complemented each other and how one medium might be better than the other — newspapers have structure and can offer legal and financial support to a writer; blogs let citizens write about what they know without having to be a professional writer and can be more easily criticized by knowledgeable readers. The topic of distribution also came up, but that’s probably a marginal issue compared to which medium has more potential to churn out credible, in-depth stories.

I thought other bloggers might be interested in this topic as well, and figured I’d also provide a link to a talk Dan Gillmor gave at Stanford on October 19 about the relative merits of each — the talk is titled “We the Media: The Rise of Open-Source, Grassroots Journalism” –it’s currently the second one down on the page; click Video Source to watch. Gillmor was a popular columnist at the San Jose Mercury News for 10 years and left early this year to become essentially a citizen journalist evangelist. His blog is Bayosphere.

Related posts:

1. Norgs: The Unconference
2. The End of an Era
3. Coming up at the Kelly Writers House
4. Check out hour two of Radio Times tomorrow
5. I Would Definitely Like One of These