Neighborhood News?

The creator of backfence.com tried to convince a room full of aspiring journalists that random bloggers from your neighborhood are just as credible as Washington Post staffers with weekly bylines.

I know I'm supposed to represent the generation of onliners, but even I have a hard time swallowing his message.

Backfence.com and others like it, are sites where neighborhood folk and average joes can inform the public about what's happening in town. Discussions about zoning and preschool lotteries need a venue to be communicated. However, Mr. Post was trying to sell a bunch George Mason University journalism students that they've wasted time and money trying to learn about the field of reporting and writing the news.

My outrage about his message is a bit ironic since I am expressing my disagreement with it via blog. I don't disagree that members of a given community are able to be informed about what goes on there, but I am a homeowner and I know that sometimes my personal frustrations about my community can skew the way I tell a story about my community.

Mr. Potts tried to convince us that the Wikipedia's of the web are cedible sources for information. If that is so true, how come professors refuse to accept Wikipedia as a citable source on papers?

I think it's a good starting point, but I never check out Wikipedia without following up my research on another site.

I would follow this same step if I used backfence.

It is the media consumers responsibility to question what they take in and investigate, but I don't want to spend so much time following up on what Mr.Johnson wrote about when I can go straight to fairfaxcounty.gov in the first place.