One suspects that this Asharq Alawsat piece on journalists and blogging is intended for readers who aren’t particularly familiar with weblogs. It does point out that blogs permit journalists to get around problems endemic to print media such as editorial policies and limited space. I’ve followed some of these blogs and find that journalists will publish expanded versions of their printed stories. Sometimes, it’s just information that didn’t fit into the ‘news well’; sometimes it’s material that didn’t make it past the editor’s censorship circuits. The piece also notes that blogging software is increasingly ‘language enabled’, permitting bloggers to write in their own languages and this has led to a huge jump in the number of blogs in Arabic, Persian, and other languages that do not use a roman alphabet.

Arab Journalists and Blogs: Between Acceptance and Hesitation
Mohamed al-Salihi

Jeddah, Asharq Al-Awsat- Blogs are an alternative means for expressing views and opinions that is fast gaining a wide acceptance among the ‘online community’ and taking printed newspapers and news websites by storm. This accounts for the large segment of youth who write on these blogs, capitalizing on the freedom they provide and the facility of interaction – advantages that are not easily available through other forms of media.

The media figures who have resorted to these blogs post their ideas, views and daily diary entries in a framework that is outside the borders set by their press institutions, which constitutes a phenomenon that is closely followed by a number of questions; the most important of which is: why have they resorted to an alternative means to transmit their journalistic output? Perhaps the recent rise of ‘journalistic blogs’ indicates that they have discovered a new outlet for writing that might even surpass their love for writing in newspapers. Writing in newspapers indicates writing for others while writing on blogs is more interactive in addition to having a much wider and more variegated audience – and the unrestrained freedom that comes with it, of course.
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