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)