Great Moments in Blogging

Compiled by Jerry Agar (with a little help from yours truly):

Not so long ago in America if it wasn’t on Walter Cronkite’s news report or in the pages of the New York Times, it wasn’t news. Most of the rest of the electronic and print reporters and commentators relied on those two entities to show them what was important.

A person who knew something the big news operations did not, especially if their news contrasted with the way the media chieftains saw the world, was labeled as a crank and dismissed.

The cost of setting up a competing news operation was a barrier to entry only a select few could penetrate. It is so cost prohibitive to start a daily paper that former KGB General Oleg Kalugin told me that it was the only piece of the “long march through the institutions” the Russians were unable to achieve.

No more.

The recent explosive story exposing the depths some ACORN employees were willing to sink to in order to thwart “the man” is the latest example of how powerful a tool the Internet is to the little guy and gal.

With the help of local bloggers listed below I have compiled a list of the “10 Great Events in the Rise of the New Media.”

We have tried to make a list of transformative moments.The Virginia Tech shootings, the landing on the Hudson and the 7/7 Tube bombings in London were initially reported by cell phone and blog, showing the power of on-site reporting with new media, but were perhaps not seminal moments, as they would have been reported anyway, and quickly, by the mainstream media (MSM).

Read the rest!