Online Journalism

“The great thing about a blog for an old-fashioned beat reporter like me is that it is journalism at its core–pounding the pavement looking for the next scoop and making sure that you stay two steps ahead of the competition. That drive was always in me as a beat reporter, but a blog elevates that to a much higher level.” – John Cook, co-founder of TechFlash

In Mark Briggs’ second chapter of “Journalism Next,” Briggs talks about the many advantages of having and maintaining a blog.

• Blogging helps develop community with readers or viewers so they can test ideas, receive early and direct feedback and publish or broadcast in the timeliest manner.
• Can help build an audience as a college journalist.
• Helps establish deeper relationships with readers and can help broaden coverage.

One of the interesting things Briggs points out is that with blogging, their isn’t as much of a sense of competition because people are more willing to share information online. In some blog posts, people link to other people’s sites or blogs and compile info from other resources online to establish their content.

How popular and powerful are blogs now? According to a report done by Technorati, “blogs have more total unique visitors than either Facebook or MySpace.” Blogs help motivate journalists and organizations to be #1. As Joel Achenbach mentioned in his article from “The Washington Post,” journalists are motivated by page views; in this case being a highly viewed blog is a great feeling.

Briggs then outlines some of the jargon associated with blogging, some of the boring stuff.

Then he outlines some tips for how to build a successful blog:

• Put the reader first
• Organize your ideas
• Be direct
• Be the authority, with a personality
• Wait 15 minutes after writing to edit yourself dispassionately.
• Make your posts scanable
• Link, summarize and analyze
• Be specific with headlines
• Have a good attitude
• Use photos and screenshots
• Post early, post often (at least once a day)
• Participate in the community
• Comment on and read other blogs
• Link to other blogs
• Use RSS feeds

As you can tell by these guidelines, a lot of these tips apply to traditional print journalism. That’s because blogging is similar to traditional print journalism, but it can be updated more often and it is more connectible to the audience than a newspaper is.

Related articles

• What’s the State of Your Blogosphere? (blogworld.com)
• Don’t Feel Guilty If…You Give it Up for Free (hollabackhealth.com)
• Oprah: “Know Your Viewer” (blogworld.com)

MANDY JENKINS, SOCIAL MEDIA PRODUCER FOR TBD (a local news site), visited my Communications 361 class (Online Journalism) today to share her experiences in her field. I appreciate what she had to share with us and attained some useful advice. In College Jenkins said that “reaching out and connecting with people individually” helped her land jobs early and I plan to emulate her actions. She showed her interest in other peoples’ careers by asking questions, sharing her own work with them, and therefore making connections. Jenkins has worked for TBD for 6 months now, where her duties include keeping track of news tips on Twitter and writing some news pieces. Starting a Twitter account in 2007 (although without much of a grasp of it yet) before it was popular, Jenkins had a hunch that social media was going somewhere for her as a journalist- in fact she created her own position as “Social Media Producer” at TBD. What I found impressive about TBD was that there are 200 + bloggers affiliated with TBD but there are only 15 professional journalists working there; it really says a lot about the changing landscape of journalism. Blogs are making their mark in journalism history, and what would traditionally be considered competition is now a resource. Jenkins herself said that today “social media can really, really help you as students,” and I can’t help but agree; what better way to profile your journalistic skills than to demonstrate your abilities and knowledge of social media in a blog?

Thanks for sharing, Mandy!

IN THIS CHAPTER I LEARNED more about audience participation in contemporary news organizations and blogs. Crowdsourcing is when journalists give audiences tasks (sometimes paid and sometimes not) just like a professional reporter. For example, if a scandal occurs involving, lets say, mortgage rates, then the community affected will be able to give more vital information than a few reporters might be able to uncover. Of course there is a limit to crowdsourcing; you should use it to help your organization or blog improve, but according to Briggs there is a greater chance of failure if you rely solely on crowdsourcing to power your news. Another way to rely on readers is to use open-source reporting, which means that an organization or blog can put out their ideas for their stories up early so that they can attain feedback, sources, and other advice from their readers to help build the story. Yet another form of reporting is beatblogging: I wasn’t too sure about what it was from the book, but I looked up more information on beatblogging.org and found that it is a blog that focuses on one topic and allows anyone to comment, debate, discuss, etc. Pretty simple. Pro-Am Journalism I already knew about through CNN’s iReport. With Pro-Am users post their own content directly to an organizations website.