Trusting Media

1. I chose to analyze the article entitled "Transparency Begets Trust in the Ever-Expanding Blogosphere." I found it very interesting, reading about why people trust blogs more than other news media, since I had never had or read blogs before this class. I agreed with some of the points made, such as the four bulleted reasons stated in the article. However, considering the fact that anyone write anything they want to would still prefer television or news paper websites to blogging websites unless the authenticity of the information could be verified.

2. This article is claiming that many people find that blogs can be trusted more than other forms of online news media such as Internet sites from journalists at the New York Times or CNN. The writer introduces information gathered from a search engine that monitors blogging activity. While this displayed the numbers of posts made each day and showed that blogs are indeed very popular, news sites such as The New York Times and CNN still pulled ahead in the list of top news sites. However, it is shown that closely following are a number of blogging websites and names of bloggers that are often visited. Later in the article, four solid examples of why readers trust blogs over other journalists are given. These four points seem to be the strongest evidence in the paper clearly stating good reasons many bloggers can be trusted. Also, the fact that bloggers can offer different perspectives while many journalists are required to simply give the facts can certainly draw readers to look more closely at blogs. While not all bloggers may be able to be trusted, this article displays many good reasons as to why some can be trusted over other news media.