Blog coverage of ongoing fight for democracy in Nepal shows the beauty of blogs
The ABC of journalism and blogs are different. Journalism is all about accuracy, balance and creditability; blogs are accurate, biased and critical. Blogs have a few advantages namely interactivity (thus more democratic for discussions) and quick (thus serving the audience with updates every now and then).
Bloggers write what they experience, so what they write is accurate from their point of view. The point of view, or the bias, I believe, is good because as a human it’s always worthy to learn how people are feeling (their emotions, happiness, angers and all) than the plain dead facts. I always believed knowing how people reacted to certain event is more important than the 5WH (what, where, when, why, who and how) of the event.
During Nepal’s ongoing general strike, or fight for democracy, the way blogs covered the event showed why blogs rock. While mainstream sites like eKantipur and NepalNews were content to little updates, blogs were constantly updating with texts, pictures and videos. And while the comments feature on eKantipur generate very less comments, it was difficult for the main bloggers to read all the comments. Some entries even generated more than 100 comments.
Frontrunners among the blogs were without doubt, United We Blog!, MeroSansar and Blogger Nepal. UWB! is in English and being run by a group of professional journalists thus despite one of the main blogger being absent, it could update with latest information and photos generating discussions on each and every issues.
Umesh Shrestha’s MeroSansar, in Nepali language, was equally good with updated every now and then and because of the video clips of the events. In both blogs, bloggers were out on the street for the reporting as far and possible thus giving the details of ‘what happened’ in the form of ‘what I saw.’ KP Dhungana and Bal Mukunda’s BloggerNepal, also in Nepali, is more radical but nevertheless didn’t miss a chance to update the events of the General Strikes with picures.
BloggersNepal too was not far behind with a few entries per day along with pictures and videos.
Rajesh KC’s Phalano.com and Sailendra Kharel’s Nepal News on Photos probably went unnoticed to many but whosoever had bookmarked them got finest pictures of all the events of Kathmandu and Nepalgunj. Pictures from Kathmandu were not much newer as newspapers carried lots of them but pictures from Nepalgunj by Sailendra were fresh and new.
More importantly blogs provides users of various viewpoints. If UWB! and MeroSansar were journalists’ views, then Zaded provided viewpoints of a human rights monitor. The blogger, who called herself Zaded, portrayed her life as an ordinary citizen and a HR monitor.
Traditional media covered the event greatly because of their resources and were informing more people than blogs. No doubt, blogs are yet to reach the big mass in the country and even outside country but the way they are covering events and providing varied views and news, they proved worth reading; and that should be called a success for the Nepali blogosphere.
