Originally published in Biblical Worldview Magazine, December 2005
In the Beginning…
Let there be light. – Genesis 1:3
On January 17, 1998, a 31-year-old CBS Studios gift shop manager in Hollywood, California, broke the biggest story of the decade. The president of the United States had been having an affair with a 23-year-old White House intern, and Newsweek, ready to run the story, spiked it at the last minute.
The gift shop manager was Matt Drudge. An ordinary citizen with a 486 computer had scooped a major news magazine, and journalism hasn’t been the same since. His web site, the Drudge Report, gets over 11 million hits a day and is read by journalists and politicians alike.
“We have entered an era vibrating with the din of small voices,” he told an audience at the National Press Club a few months later. “Every citizen can be a reporter…The Net gives as much voice to a…computer geek like me as to a CEO or speaker of the House. We all become equal.”
Drudge uttered those prescient words before the advent of web sites called weblogs, or “blogs.” Blogs have ushered in a new era, and that sentiment can’t be overstated. Traditional media’s monopoly on what is newsworthy is eroding. Citizen journalists – ordinary people collecting, analyzing, reporting, and disseminating information – are bypassing the gatekeepers.
The blogging explosion is often compared to the Protestant Reformation. With the invention of the printing press, an individual suddenly had the power to communicate with the masses without interference from institutional elites. With the emergence of blogging, we’ve all become potential Martin Luthers in the midst of our own modern day reformation.
