Online journalism is less credible as compared to mainstream media.

What is online journalism? According to Dr.Rahmat Ghazali in his book, “Online Journalism on Malaysian Socio-Political Landscapes”, he scrutinizes it through two separate root words: ‘journalism’ and ‘online’. Journalism could be defined as any non-fiction or documentary narrative that reports or analysis facts and events firmly rooted in time. Reporters, writers, and editors select and arrange such materials to tell a story from a particular point of view through one or more forms of media; audio, video, textual and pictures.

While, ‘online’ is a generic term often used loosely to describe the process of accessing, retrieving or disseminating of digital information (Ward 2003).

In regard to that, the definition of mainstream media is major television networks and newspapers. Most mainstream media outlets are biased right or left but pretend to be neutral (Urban Dictionary).

Is it true that online journalism is less credible as compared to mainstream media? Let me show the current trend between online journalism and mainstream media.

"Online journalism" provides professional reporters the chance to collect many more data points than they can on their own. While, “mainstream media” provide readers an established, popular distribution channel for the information we have and can collect. Not to mention a century of wisdom on sourcing, avoiding libel and narrative storytelling technique. And what happen was our readers don't care about the way the news is reporting. Journalism is journalism, no matter who does it, or where the source comes from. They just want the most complete, accurate and engaging coverage possible. They don't know how we make the sausage, or even who makes it. They just want to eat.

The important of mainstream media is already told yet cannot be denied. Where would blogging be without the mainstream media? Few of us have the resources to cover news the way they do, and even fewer of us have the training and raw talent.

To me, to be called a journalist, mainstream, citizen or otherwise, you have to fulfill some requirements. Real journalism answers who, what, when, where and how. Journalists write in as objective a manner as possible. They provide fair and accurate accounting for both sides of a story. That's not to say they can't write opinion, but I think opinion ought to be labeled as such, just as it is in the newspaper.

However, mainstream media is actually taking a back seat to the un-mainstream these days and it makes you wonder what we really consider to be mainstream. Do we consider the newspaper that we occasionally read mainstream? Or do we think of our favorite blogs, which we check every hour, as mainstream?

There really is no right answer in this situation, but we have to take into account the facts of the matter. The fact is, there are plenty of un-mainstream sites (blogs) that are generating more revenue than entire news organizations.

The only difference as a big picture between blogs and the mainstream press is lack of censorship. So to the extent that bloggers write in such a manner, it's fair to consider online journalism as real journalism. I guess the question is: what is journalism, and do we value the concept?