Is blogging really journalism?

(Yes. Obviously.)

The evolution of content dynamics online has left traditional news organizations needing to adapt in how they model their business and their readership. It’s fair to say there’s still considerable disagreement as to the best new strategy. Sites like Times Online, for instance, have built a paywall, and rely on the quality of their content, the strength of their offline brand, and exclusive benefits to entice readers. MailOnline, the website of the Daily Mail, is by this point the most-read English-language news site in the world, and its model is decidedly different: its content is free, its advertisers are many, and large swathes of the site toe a very fine line between gossip magazine content and newspaper articles.

All of this has meant that the definition of news has been obscured and appropriated. What twenty years ago would never have passed as news, is now part and parcel of the game. Whether the energy behind this clickbait model will last forever is an entirely different question, but the line between serious, po-faced journalism and casual, light-hearted blogging has never been thinner, if by this point it’s even visible at all.

What’s more interesting and perhaps more telling is the editorializing of news, whereby a constant flurry of opinion pieces and columns allow newspapers to stoke controversial fires and weigh in from one or various new angles on a subject that might by that point be drifting from the plane of public consciousness.

With these new content lines, we’ve seen an increasing number of bloggers taking up the mantle of “real journalism”, with investigative acumen and in-depth analysis migrating from the domain of Fleet Street to, well, the rest of the world. There’s more space in readers’ understanding of content now for them to trust other channels of information; the authority of a wide circulation has diminished, and the availability of information means that referencing and sourcing ideas and data is easier than ever.

All of this has resulted in an undercurrent of “not proper” proper journalism which is occasionally dipped into by major publications. That includes curated blogs which are thought leaders in their industry, the personal blogs of experts, and a million different forms in between. Sure, there are still angry blogs that belong to teenagers in their bedrooms, but they’re few and far between. Blogging has grown up, and is a respected and valuable arena. And I’m not just saying that because this is a blog.

Vote for our blog! 2011 "Language Lovers" voting opens

Our blog has once again been nominated as one of the Top 100 language blogs – renamed this year as the “Top 100 Language Lovers” – in the Language Professionals category.

We are honoured to be part of this list for the 3rd year running – if you like reading our blog, please vote using the button below, or use this link.

Thanks for your support, we’ll let you know the results!

Live Translation integrates with qtranslate

Live Translation is now integrated with popular WordPress plugin qtranslate. qtranslate is a multilingual content management plugin for WordPress that allows you to manage multilingual versions of your blog and facilitates the translation process.

With the combination of Live Translation and qtranslate you can now choose to have your blog posts undergo professional translation in a matter of hours.

qtranslate comes with several key languages already configured, and is really user-friendly, making it the plugin of choice for many international bloggers.

For more information, contact sales[at]web-translations.co.uk.

Web-Translations voted top language blog for second year running

We did it again! Thanks to your eager voting, we were ranked in the Top 100 Language Blogs this year for the second year running!

See the full list…

Thanks to all of you who voted for us, we really appreciate your support!

Vote for our Blog!

For the second year running, the Web-Translations blog has been nominated as one of the Top 100 blogs in the Language Professionals category – we now need your help to make sure we get into the overall Top 100, which is split into 4 categories:

Language Professionals (this is us!)
Language Teaching
Language Learning
Language Technology

Voting is really quick & easy – simply follow this link, and then select the button next to wéb-tränslatiôns:

http://www.lexiophiles.com/language-blog-toplist/top-100-language-blogs-2010-vote-for-language-professionals

Voting closes on the 24th of May – Please forward this on to anyone else you think might help us out by voting.

Thanks! We’ll let you know the results as soon as we find out.