Blogging For Journalists / from SreeTips.com

Interesting piece in today’s WSJ about a dilemma faced by many bloggers: You have to keep blogging to raise traffic, but how do you take a vacation? 

The Wall Street Journal
August 31, 2006; Page B1 

No Day at the Beach
Bloggers Struggle With What to Do About Vacation
By ELIZABETH HOLMES
E-mail: elizabeth.holmes[at]wsj.com

Excerpt:

A banner stripped across the top of the Daily Dish declares that the popular Web log’s host, Andrew Sullivan, has "gone fishing." Mr. Sullivan declared a two-week vacation and opted to leave his political blog behind. Several thousand of his readers have done the same. Despite the efforts of three verbose guest bloggers, replacements handpicked by Mr. Sullivan, the site’s visitor tally has fallen. The Daily Dish, now part of Time magazine, usually garners around 90,000 unique visitors, or individual readers, each day. At the start of the first workweek without him, Mr. Sullivan’s blog received about 67,000 hits, according to Site Meter. This week, traffic has hovered around 57,000. "The frequency of emails of ‘Bring back Andrew’ and ‘This is stupid. Bring back Andrew’ is definitely higher than anything I’ve ever written," says David Weigel, a 24-year-old assistant editor at Reason magazine, who is one of Mr. Sullivan’s guest bloggers and has filled in at other sites in the past.

In the height of summer-holiday season, bloggers face the inevitable question: to blog on break or put the blog on a break? Fearing a decline in readership, some writers opt not to take vacations. Others keep posting while on location, to the chagrin of their families. Those brave enough to detach themselves from their keyboards for a few days must choose between leaving the site dormant or having someone blog-sit. To be sure, most bloggers don’t agonize over this decision. Of the 12 million bloggers on the Internet, only about 13% post daily, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Even fewer — 10% — spend 10 or more hours a week on their blogs. Yet for the sliver of people whose livelihood depends on the blog — whether they are conservative, liberal or don’t care — stepping away from the keyboard can be difficult.

Chicago Tribune
Aug. 17, 2006

Welcome to the world of blogs
Online or in print, good reporting will find an open window

By Timothy J. McNulty, Public Editor 

Exceprt: 

There is no substitute for an investigative reporter examining documents, a writer sitting through a trial or a correspondent witnessing events in Baghdad or Beirut. The work of people asking questions, seeing (and photographing) events, uncovering truth or fragments of a larger truth is what informs the public. But I suspect what readers are telling us is that the attraction of the online world is not only the immediacy of information, but their desire for interaction: to be able to comment and reflect on events, to explore others’ thoughts or to express their own frustrations and pleasure and anger. That desire has given rise to the blogging world.

Read the whole piece:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-0608170103aug17,1,846142.column?coll=chi-news-col&ctrack=1&cset=true

 

Jossip, the popular entertainment blog, interviews Us Weekly blogger Noelle Hancock. Her blog is called "This Minute: Our non-stop celebrity news blog."

An excerpt from the Q&A:

Initially, what attracted you to the job of "Us Weekly blogger?"

Who, among us, hasn’t aspired to write about Jessica Simpson’s hair extensions for a living? Or wanted to ask the questions everyone else is asking like, “Is Keira [Knightley] too skinny?”

Honestly, it’s just a really fun gig. I actually got an email from someone who wanted to be Brad and Angelina’s nanny and sent me her resume so I could pass it along to them. How could you not love a job after something like that? Good times.

I haven’t had a chance to read the piece yet, but the first piece at ShareSleuth.com has just been unveiled. SS is the work of Chris Carey, a business reporter at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was hired by billionaire Mark Cuban to run an investigative business reporting site. From Carey’s opening note on the site, "Welcome to the Jungle" -

My goals for Sharesleuth.com are to shine a spotlight on questionable companies, to build an audience through unique, compelling stories and to generate multimedia content for other outlets, including HDNet and HDNet Films.

Unlike mainstream media outlets, we’re going to have a clear bias – against deception and corruption. We’re going to depart from the traditional “he said, she said’’ model of journalism, with its false balance and toothless objectivity.

The first piece, an investigative report about Xenathol Corp, a producer of alternative fuels, is at http://sharesleuth.com/2006/08/moonshine_blindness.html

Reax?