CTV colleague David Akin has a blog posting (which I first saw through Blog on blog) talking about an interview he did with j-prof Jay Rosen of PressThink.

In it, Akin makes the point that blogging hasn't changed his reporting style, the Internet has. Read the following exchange based on that.

Okay. It's the Internet that's changing journalism. If that's the case, why blog?

David Akin: The blog is an increasingly important tool for newsgathering and for maintaining a connection with the community or ecosystem of those that you report on. That last part was the bit that surprised me as I started blogging. It has made my print reporting interactive.

I write; I publish. And that used to be the end of it. Now, I write, I publish and a community of people who have special knowledge or who are deeply interested in the topic amplify, correct, modify, or extend the reportage. For a beat reporter, this is fabulous, because I now have more knowledge about my beat.

I haven't seen this work for my television reporting and I think there are a couple of reasons. First, blogs, like newspapers, are a logocentric medium and TV is not. Second, you can't easily link to TV pieces or "quote" TV pieces or respond in the same way as the original piece, that is, with video.

This period of Akin's professional life probably isn't representative, but if you look on the articles on his blog's main page going back to Jan. 20, I see one posting about Blogjet where a public response provided a useful response from someone -- and that post wasn't related to his coverage or beat (well, maybe his old beat).

Actually, January must have been a dry month. There was no public posting that, to my eyes, was a serious critique of something Akin wrote or broadcast.

It would be interesting to know how much more information flowed in through cellphone calls, e-mail or other methods in response to something that was originally posted on the blog.

With respects to my own work for CTV News Online, I've sometimes posted links to bylined stories that I've done for my employer. They have generated exactly nothing in follow-up.

It just doesn't compare to the e-mail received through the website's own feedback mechanisms.

While I'm all for anything that extends communication and interactivity with one's audience, I wonder if blogs are being oversold in this regard.

I'd love some comments, but if I were a bettin' man ... :)