Blogging For Journalists / from SreeTips.com

From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, here’s a useful guide to building and audience on the web - by Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig.

In this chapter you will learn about:

• Defining and reaching your project’s audience(s)
• Ways to market your site, from individual contacts to mass media
• How Google and other search engines rank your site and refer visitors
• Getting your visitors to come back to your site regularly and contribute suggestions for improvement
• What server logs are, and how they may help you understand the strengths and weaknesses of your site

Take a look at the guide, folks. 

Los Angeles Times
March 17, 2007

Blogs can top the presses
Talking Points Memo drove the U.S. attorrneys story, proof that Web writers with input from devoted readers can reshape journalism.
By Terry McDermott, Times Staff Writer

 "Hundreds of people out there send clips and other tips [on various stories]. There is some real information out there, some real expertise. If you’re not in politics and you know something, you’re not going to call David Broder. With the blog, you develop an intimacy with people. Some of it is perceived, but some of it is real.

Read the full story. 

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

David Carr’s media column on mainstream journalists doing new media projects.

Content may or may not be king, but it’s mighty valuable. Journalists, who know a thing or two about its creation, are beginning to build sites that help them maintain custody of the content and, if all goes well, reap the rewards. Om Malik, a former writer for Business 2.0, has received backing for GigaOM.com, a technology news Web site that has broken a number of stories, and Rafat Ali, the former managing editor of The Silicon Alley Reporter, recently received funding for his company, which publishes PaidContent.org, a site that covers digital media news.

 Read full story:

The New York Times
July 24, 2006

A Sideline That Competes With a Byline
By David Carr
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/24/business/media/24carr.html

Mark Glaser, who writes the MediaShift column for PBS.org, interviews the blogger with arguably the largest regular, non-blog audience in the world, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams (his show’s The Daily Nightly blog just turned one). 

Blogger-Anchor Brian Williams Defends Nightly Newscasts
http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2006/06/digging_deeperbloggeranchor_br.html

One of the many interesting points: "People should know that I read every e-mail received by the broadcast, I read every e-mail received by the blog."

Romenesko points to an interview by Robert Niles in OJR.org with reporter Mark Sando about his Seahawks Insider blog:

Mark Sando, who writes the award-winning Seahawks Insider blog, is asked about the potential risks for a newspaper reporter who blogs. "I think a blog will expose a poor reporter more quickly, while allowing a good reporter to flourish more demonstrably. Also, the comments section of a blog will test a reporter’s restraint. I’ve spent a fair amount of time maintaining the comments section by discouraging crassness, hot-temperedness and overall idiocy."

Read "Using Blogs to Make Reporters More Relevant." 

WorldPress.org has an article that looks at the state of blogging around the world and includes some interesting trivia about the origin of the word blog and related matters. It also highlights threats to free speech and citizen journalism.

     A bulletin from France’s Reporters Without Borders (May 3) presented a foreboding look into the possible future repression of bloggers’ freedom of expression: "Dictators would seem powerless faced with this explosion of online material. How could they monitor the e-mails of China’s 130 million users or censor the messages posted by Iran’s 70,000 bloggers? The enemies of the Internet have unfortunately shown their determination and skill in doing just that. Censorship of the Web is growing and is now done on every continent. Traditional ‘predators of press freedom’ - Belarus, Burma, Cuba, Iran, Libya, the Maldives, Nepal, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam - all censor the Internet now. In 2003, only China, Vietnam and the Maldives had imprisoned cyber-dissidents. Now more countries do.

Full item: http://www.worldpress.org/2373.cfm

Hat tip: Julia Levy

Adrian Holovaty is an online journalists I - and many others in the industry - admire greatly. Even though he’s young - he got his BA from Univ. of Missouri in 2001 - he’s one of the most influential folks working in our business today, thanks to his work as head of editorial innovations at the WashingtonPost.com and his projects, such as ChicagoCrime.org and several others. He was invited to give the commencement address at his alma mater this month and the text of his speech is worth reading. It’s not about blogs per se, but there’s a lot about the changing media landscape.

And if you get frustrated at work, do projects in your spare time. Start your own thing. The Chicago crime site I told you about was just a side project for me; I did it because it was exciting to do something that hadn’t been done before. I know of two journalists in Chicago who both quit their jobs in professional media and have started doing independent journalism on the Web. And I know of more than a dozen journalists who keep blogs in which they write about the industry — what were good ideas, what were bad ideas, what the industry needs to do next. 

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Legal Guide for Bloggers should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in blogging:

http://www.eff.org/bloggers/lg/