How should newspapers approach blogs? How close should the relationship be between blogs and the print edition, bloggers and editors, stories and opinion, comments and posts?
"Blogging between the lines" addresses those thorny issues, after a Poynter Online discussion led to the establishment of some guidelines. The point is blogs are now and have been for a few years an inevitable part of newspapers and it's time for the uninvolved ones to stop pussyfooting around and get with the program. You better start swimmin' or you'll sink like a stone, as Bob Dylan sings.
The discussion didn't result in any hard and fast rules but did offer some suggestions:
Blogs attract a different audience than print newspapers and they should be treated and executed as such. In other words it's not effective to translate the tone and feeling directly, but rather inject some informality, brevity and commentary to blogs. That's hard for journalists to shrug off, especially if objectivity has been beaten in their heads their whole lives. Perhaps the best way for the fogies (both old and young) to become more adept at bloggery is to start small. I mean, blogs as a whole aren't weighty things and shouldn't be treated as such. Let the Wall Street Journal and New York Times stay as they are in terms of their reporting excellence and credibility, but for the blogs that mingle in the minutiae, the pointless and the irreverent: bring them on. I've been blogging for six years now, and my first blog was indeed pointless. I hesitate to admit this to my classmates / relatives / friends / Bralapistas, but I have a tail-less manx/angora cat named Baxter. He looks and acts like a rabbit, including his little hop. Anyway, he "wrote" a blog detailing his life, and it was called "Baxter News Daily." Posts were short, quippy and involved his perspective on life, the universe and everything, and I'd need to spend a while looking for them, but my friends, and anybody who knew Baxter, was a fan. I'm admittedly a cat person, but I get along just as well with dogs. BND, as the hipsters called it, lasted only a few months, as most blogs do, but writing BND got me into writing a personal blog, which connected me with my friends while I was away at college. As if it's that far, but Facebook didn't exist back then.
Baxter gets intense with his paper bags, and his alter-ego, Bagster, is ready to save the world from mischief and mayhem.
4 comments:
"The point is blogs are now and have been for a few years an inevitable part of newspapers and it's time for the uninvolved ones to stop pussyfooting around and get with the program."
I agree. But what's ironic is that many smaller newspapers -- the papers that would perhaps benefit the most from blogs as a source of community news and commentary -- will probably be the last to get with the program. Examples around this area would include the New Ulm Journal and other Ogden-owned papers in southern Minnesota (Marshall, Fairmont papers). Odgen has actually gone ahead with a "CU" feature on their web sites where all photos are uploaded to the site, but this is so that they can make a profit on people buying reprints of any photos up there. It'd be nice to see the same sort of progress when it comes to blogs, etc.
You're right, and like I said in my post, the blog should give the writer more freedom to express his or herself on their expert topic. Blogs give them the chance to say things they usually wouldn't in print and that's the way it should stay.
BRALAPA DOES NOT TEST ITS BLOG PRODUCT ON ANIMALS.
Priceless.
And Derek expresses a point that I've read many times by 2.0 experts in the news field. Nobody really knows how all of this will finally end up but the time to start in is now.
Bronson, I agree with your posting. The reason I am leaving a comment, however, is the photo of Baxter. That is the best caption - and photo - probably in existence. I cannot hope to compete with that. If Baxter is an expert at reporting the news (which is what I assume you mean by "ready to save the world from mischief and mayhem"), then Tucker is a novice blogger, at best. Perhaps they can form a reporting pet duo the likes of which the world has never seen. Baxter could impart his worldly knowlege on Tucker, but Tucker would offer the youthful edge. Get back to me on this one...
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