Blogging For Journalists / from SreeTips.com

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.

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

 

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. 

Here is a Jan. 2005 Wired piece by NYU’s Adam Penenberg that needs updating but has a lot of useful information about the adventures of some of the big bloggers who also happen to be journalists.

Heartaches of Journalist Bloggers
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,66251,00.html

Excerpt:

For all the press that bloggers have received for revolutionizing journalism by bringing Gutenberg’s printing press to the digital masses, when push comes to shove, journalists who operate personal weblogs face an inherent conflict of interest. In the end, it’s the blogs that usually get short shrift.

Here’s a guide to blogs from the NYT’s Rich Meislin. In an example of how things work online, instead of being an internal document, it’s offered up to the public as well.

Blogs 101
By Rich Meislin 

o get the feel of Web logs and blogging, visit some of these sites. Most blogs carry links to other blogs on related topics or that the author likes (known as a blogroll). This page is under development; feel free to suggest your own finds. Business and sports are being built, and suggestions are particularly welcome.

In Nov. 2003, New York magazine ran a piece about six of the biggest bloggers in NYC.

Blog Blog Blog
The New York Weblog explosion has created a new wave of chattering-class grandees. So what if they’re sitting at home in their bathrobes?
By Simon Dumenco

Who are these people? Well, there are way too many of them to count (or hire). But what follows is a look at a handful of some of the most compelling players.

Of course, since as of last week there were 2,767 blogs being published in New York City (according to the charming site nycbloggers.com), I expect to be blogged to death for my choices.

 

As part of the Feb. 2006 cover story, NY magazine ran a chart looking at the top 50 blogs and wrote short, useful descriptions of each. 

Linkology
By Stuart Luman

There are upwards of 27 million blogs in the world. To discover how they relate to one another, we’ve taken the most-linked-to 50 and mapped their connections. Each arrow represents a hypertext link that was made sometime in the past 90 days. Think of those links as votes in an endless global popularity poll. Many blogs vote for each other: “blogrolling.” Some top-50 sites don’t have any links from the others shown here, usually because they are big in Japan, China, or Europe—regions still new to the phenomenon.