Many college and university students have operated a blog (short for ' weblog') at some point, or are at least familiar with the concept.

More and more professors are adding them to course requirements, requiring students to create and maintain blogs over the semester. I have seen this trend exploding at the university where I teach, in subjects ranging from computer science to English Literature.

A journalism professor explains his motivation in this BBC News article:

It's useful for my students to understand how things get online, since most online publications these days insulate the content creators - whether journalists or not - from the detail of website creation by offering content management systems of more or less sophistication.

And of course having to write a blog entry as part of their coursework forces students to read the papers, look around websites and generally take an interest in what is happening with new media, something I want to encourage.

But the real point of getting a journalist blogging at this early stage in his or her career is that the bloggers, in all their variety, with all their different skills and abilities and interests and biases, are reshaping the world in which professional journalists operate just as much as the telephone shook up the profession in the first half of the 20th Century.