New vs. Old Media in Greece
All over the world, blogs seem to be gaining a more important role every single day. The phrase ‘I heard it on the news’ has been replaced by a newly coined phrase ‘I read it on that blog!’. A similar thing has been happening here in my country, Greece, for quite some time now.
The latest sign of the rise of blogs was shown last December when citizen journalism was all over the place. The news of a 16-year-old boy shot dead by a policeman caused violent riots in Athens, and the bloggers not only covered the incident, but they were the first to report it.
As soon as the gunshot was heard, bloggers that live nearby wrote about the incident and what they saw. Videos posted on YouTube, witnesses’ reports and photos uploaded succeeded in providing readers a full and accurate story.
On the other hand, Greek traditional media came second after blogs in terms of news coverage and focused on issues that the audience was not interested in. The TV channels’ reports focused on damages caused by anarchists, looters etc., and did not try to understand and then analyze what was happening and why. Blogs however, along with the participation of their readers, managed to report thoroughly and open a huge discussion about the riots.
Statistics show that 91% of Greek bloggers are not satisfied with national media. Maybe that’s why they choose to take news-making in their own hands or… keyboards. The relationship between Greek citizens and journalists has always been tricky. Greek media are accused of serving certain interests. Even public television has often been accused of misinforming.
This is mainly because quite often, the connection between publishers and TV organizations owners, and politicians has proved to be very strong. It’s typical for some newspapers and networks to advocate one particular political party without any hesitation and Greece has seen many cases of journalists being bribed by businessmen or politicians. Together with the newspapers firing journalist because of the financial crisis so fewer journalists have to cover the same number of stories, leading to bad journalism, all these incidents have caused a great fall of Greek traditional media popularity.
At the moment good journalism is missing in Greece and viewers protest by choosing the blogs or even foreign media to get informed. The most popular blogs are personal blogs by anonymous journalists. These are often very successful since their moderators, by not telling their name, reveal a lot more and express personal views that they wouldn’t dare to publish in other media.
What is going on in Greece these years is not a battle between new and old media, though unfortunately traditional media tend to perceive it this way. However, bloggers have stated that the enemy is not traditional media but the misinformation by the political system. Blogs do not intend to destroy networks and newspapers. Bloggers are here to help them change, to help them become better, not to vanish them. Traditional media and blogs serve the same mission - informing the public. In my perspective, one should help the other develop properly and become better.
