Job Blog Insurance

Amy Gahran has a great post on how every journalist should have a blog as, amongst other things, job insurance.

She adds to that some great hints on starting and running a blog. Most you've seen before, but to these she adds: Don't work for anyone who won't let you keep blogging.

Well said.

Journalists and Blogging

I've tried to convince a number of journalists that they don't exist if they don't have their own blog.

For the modern journalist it's a wonderful and free way to interact with your readers and find out more about the stories you're working on. I'm always surprised at the amount of resistance journalists and editors put up to the idea of starting their own blogs.

So it was very refreshing to read an article on Alfred Hermida's blog entitled How blogging creates new opportunities for journalists. It lays out a number of examples of how blogging has helped journalist and blogger Scott Elliott to do his job, and ends with an editor's reasons why he likes to hire journalists who are blogging.

Also: For beginning bloggers here are a few useful words from Jay Rosen about "mastering the hoziontal part of publishing."

Swim with the Fish

It's not enough for and old media organization, a newspaper or a radio station, to be blogging. If you want to be a part of a community you need to be posting comments equally vigorously in other people's blogs.

This is a collegial community. Being a shark in this environment earns you little attention. You need to swim with the fish if you want any respect from them. And you swim with the fish by commenting on their blogs.

Bladvice: Advice for Bloggers

When old media organizations start blogging, are they really blogging? Aren't they just using Web 2.0 tools to add some extra pages to their Web sites? Isn't a blogger someone who has his/her own site with his/her own voice?

But, ignoring all that, here's some advice for bloggers from Amy Gahran at Poynter Online.

She says a) loosen up, blogs are personal, b) make it clear who's talking, c) add links, d) make your feed available, e) add picutures and other stuff, and f) allow comments.

There's nothing new here but she states the case well. Take a moment to read it.

Section 230 Protections

Section 230 Protections for bloggers. Read more about them at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The First Draft Problem

When you read something written, whether it's a book, or the instructions to your toaster, you want it to be as good as it could be. Well written, informative, clear, economical in its use of words.

That's why book writing and journalism include exhaustive processes to edit our scribblings. That's why writers think of writing as a craft. In the editing process scribblings become writing. Disjointed thoughts, through a collaborative process between writers and editors, become good writing.

But when I'm writing this blog, no one is telling me to cut this, or rewrite that. That's my concern. Certainly I do some editing myself. I rework for copy. I check my facts and my spelling.

But there are times when I don't have time for that. I'm just writing an idea. I get it on the page and I publish it. I think "I'll go back later and work on that." But the fact is that the world moves on. It's often a long time before I get back to a post. Sometimes I never get back there.

I suspect most blog writing is like this. And I suspect that very little is edited by a second person; an editor.

Which leads me to the lament of journalists and J-School professors. That content on the Web is not edited, crafted or fact-checked.

I call that The First Draft Problem. We're creating a huge resource of information, but it's all first draft content.

The Future of New(s)

Well, you're right. "The Future of News" would have been a great title for this blog, but that title's already taken.

So I whacked off the "s" leaving: The Future of New.

Intriguing. ...the future of new.

I set these pages up in April 2007 as a presentation for a group of journalists, thinking I would work on it over a number of months to hone it into something I could use on a regular basis. The rest is history...