The following is an article about the Brooklyn Blogfest 2011 by Samuel Newhouse of The Brooklyn Eagle:
Who are bloggers, exactly? Well, they’re people who love to write about the little things that matter to them — whether it’s the unique behavior of a homeless person on the sidewalk or talking about how to bake the “Lazy Day” cake.
No one’s sure whether it’s the Brooklyn magic that makes borough residents blog about their day-to-day thoughts and observations or vice versa. But at the 2011 Sixth Annual Brooklyn Blogfest at the Bell House in Park Slope, bloggers of all stripes were in attendance.
Cooking and restaurants are popular topics for blogs, as is Brooklyn’s thriving music scene. Many bloggers just write about their little observations of life.
Some are dedicated, daily bloggers, while others are infrequent gadabouts.
However, the blogfest’s keynote speaker, Jeff Jarvis, urged attendees to consider the enormous potential for “advocacy blogging” and “citizen journalism.” He believes there is an untapped market for commercial networks to post their ads on blogs that could make blogging a real career, thereby improving the blog “eco-system.”
“Our holy quest is to try to find ways to support your work as a business because we believe if we can support it, more will come,” said Jarvis, professor of media at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism. Jarvis said the decline of print media has left, for example, dozens of former Star-Ledger journalists unemployed in northern New Jersey. Ironically, their area is woefully undercovered in media.
If there was a commercially viable way for these writers to cover their neighborhoods and make a living as “citizen journalists,” they would help the communities, Jarvis suggested, by providing in-depth coverage of everything from potholes to politics.
“The glory days of the Brooklyn Eagle are gone,” Jarvis said, possibly unaware of this paper’s existence. “You are the new Brooklyn Eagle.”
Speaking of the Brooklyn Eagle, read the rest of this article at that very newspaper’s website.