Online Journalism 1 - Weblogs and Journalism

One last thing...

Here's something to read for next week - if you're not too busy working on your group blogs. Clive Thompson - the journalist behind Collision Detection, one of the blogs we looked at in class a while back, wrote a great piece about the rise of blog publishing for profit in New York Magazine around a year ago. A year is a long time in the blogosphere, but the piece is still really interesting and tells you a lot about the blog publishing business and how it works. Give it a read and we'll talk about it next week.

Pre-production planning for your blogzines

There are various things you need to discuss and sort out for your group blogzines. First, you need to decide on a name. You also need to decide on a design template.

To do this, you'll need to think carefully about your target audience and the overall approach of your blog. So ask yourselves - who are your target readers? What do they need/want from your blog?

Once you're happy with name and design, the blog editors (Aimee or Michelle) need to set the blog up on their account and then invite the other group members on to be contributors. The Blogger Help section has a useful FAQ on this.

Next, you need to think about your editorial approach. Ask youselves:

• How long will your posts be? How often will you post per day?
• What kind of mix of posts will you create - i.e. will they all be short punchy reviews, or will some be longer think/opinion pieces?
• Think about the style and attitude of the posts - are you going to informative, ironic, sarcastic, bitchy? Do you want a kind of house style? 
• Think about how you use links - what will you link to and how will you handle links in the posts? 
• How will you handle visuals? Will all posts have visuals?

Next, you need to think about your blogrolls - this is the name for the lists of links blogs often feature on the right or left of the screen. You can put all sorts of useful links in your blogrolls. On personal sites, you could have a list of your friends' blogs. Or you could have a list of your favourite sites. If your blog covers a particular area, you could include a list of relevant/useful sites...

Sorting out a link list (as Blogger calls it) is now pretty easy. In its general Help section on layouts, Blogger has a useful guide to adding a link list (and other page elements).

Think about what you want to add to the basic template. What do you need to add so that people know what your blog is about and how to use it effectively?

Next - you need to think about researching your material. Where are you going to get your ideas for posts from? Online? The real world? The papers? Try to identify some key sources for material - remember, you're going to have write around five posts a day between you.

Next, why not try doing a test post or two. You can try out ideas, see how things work, see if the team blog tools work. Once you're happy, try to come up with a plan for ensuring a steady, regular flow of posts on the blog. Is everybody going to post once a day? Or should each person take responsibility for posting on one day? Come up with a plan...

That's quite a lot. But if we get all that done, we should be in a position to go live.... on Monday? What do you reckon?

What we're going to do today

Loads, I hope. Were going to kick off with some feedback on your blogs so far, specifically your opinion pieces and YouTube reviews. I will probably ramble a bit more about reviews after that. I think, if there's time, I'll also talk some more about linking and link text, the words you use to signal a link. After that, we need to get on with planning your group blogzines, more of which later.

One thing we should think about before we do that. A couple of weeks ago, Camilla Chafer got in touch with me. She blogs for Shiny Media's Bridalwave and she'd noticed that we'd been looking at it in class (via my blog). I've been in touch with Camilla and she's happy to answer a few questions about what she does and how blogging fits in with her freelance writing career.

So - what we need to do is come up with some questions we could email her. Do you want to ask her about writing for Bridalwave? Or do you want to ask about freelancing and journalism in general? Have a look at her homepage and then try to come up with a few potential questions. We'll go over them in class.

Homework - Review something else from YouTube

OK - what I want you to do for next week is write a review of a video from YouTube (or one of the other video sharing sites). You can pick something yourself. However, if you're stuck for ideas, you could try reviewing a YouTube phenomenon called LonelyGirl15. You might need a little bit of background to understand the whole thing - Wikipedia has a good run down.

Reviewing

In the last half of the session, time permitting, we're going to look at reviewing. I'll talk a bit about reviewing technique and then I want you to try to write a quick review in class. Nothing too long.

So what are we going to review? Well, I think it might be interesting to review some of the content on YouTube. It's accessible and short - we can watch it in class and talk about it. I think there might be some mileage in becoming a YouTube reviewer - someone who finds interesting things on YouTube, Revver, GoogleVideo etc... and then writes about them. It's like the modern version of a TV critic.

To start off, we're going to review a short video called YouTubers. What I want you to do is embed the video on your blogs and write a short 100 word review of it.  Here's the vid

Here's another YouTube video which is sort of similar - have a look at it and see what you think.

Planning your group blogs

Once you've analysed the Shiny Media blogs in more detail, we'll revisit the initial ideas and decide which ones might work the best. Then I'll split you up into groups. I think we'll set out to do two blogs - possibly three depending on your ideas and how you feel about it.

What you need to think about for next week is planning your group blogzine. Think about the name and the design. Think about your editorial approach and where you're going to get your material from. Think about how often you're going to update. Think about how to link to other blogs and how to market your blog. We'll go over these ideas in class next week and set up the blogs.

Analysing a Shiny blog

For the next part of the session, I'll split you up into twos. Then I want you to analyse a week's worth of posts on a particular Shiny Media blog.

Note down what sort of posts feature on the blog.

Are they news updates, new product reviews, reviews of other websites, opinion pieces, gossip? Try to categorise them.

How long are the posts? What kind of style are they written in? How do they use links?

Which posts draw the most comments? How do the writers interact with their readers. 

Post your notes on your class blogs and link to the sites/posts you're writing about.

Researching Shiny Media

Today, we're going to be developing ideas for a blog-zine. I asked you all last week to think of ideas. We'll go over those in class first and try to figure out which ones are likely to work.

We need to come up with two ideas that are going to work for a particular target market and be achievable for you. In other words, it wouldn't be wise to come up with an idea for a blog about gadgets that relies on you getting a steady stream of high tech toys to review... That obviously isn't going to happen. So we need  an idea that relies on material that isn't too hard to find.

The first step in honing our ideas might be to make the brief more specific. So let's imagine that we're trying to come up with a new blog for Shiny Media - we've already looked at several of their sites in past classes. So the first step is to research the company properly.

Look on their site and find out what kind of blogs they publish and what their approach to publishing online is in general. Find out how long they've been going, how they decide to set up a particular blog and how many contributors a blog needs.

See if you can find out which of their blogs are the most successful. Have they started blogs which they've stopped because they weren't reaching a target audience? Who writes their blogs? Can we get in touch with them? 

Post your notes on your class blogs.

Writing comment

In the second half of this session we're looking at writing comment and opinion. I'm going to go over some general ideas about writing comment, then we're going to look at some blog posts pulled from '2005: Blogged', a collection of the best blog posts from that year, edited by Tim Worstall. The aim is to see how different comment/opinion on blogs is from the stuff you read in print.

For the homework this week, I want you to write a short opinion piece on your blog, using some of the ideas we talk about in the session. You can write about anything you like. But if you're short of an idea, why not read 'Say Everything', by Emily Nussbaum.

A piece in this week's New York Magazine, it argues that, thanks to MySpace, we're now seeing the biggest generation gap since the age of rock and roll. Her point is that old folks don't get why young people want to share so much of their lives online. What do you think of the piece? Is she right? Respond to it - comment on it, use links and stuff elsewhere online to back up your argument.

Blogzines to look at

One of the things we're going to be doing over the next few weeks is setting up some blogzines. It's a kind of group project. The idea is to get you having a go straightaway at creating a commercial blog that, in theory, could draw an audience of interested readers and even draw in some advertising. I'm going to split you up into groups - two or three, I'm not sure. Then the aim will be to come up with an idea for a commercial blogzine.

So what we need to do now is competition analysis. We need to look at what's out there - to figure out if there's a gap in the market or if there's a niche interest or an audience we could serve better.

The key players in the commercial world are Nick Denton, whose Gawker Media pioneered the idea of using blogs to create lean, mean money-making online magazines. His main competition in the US comes from Weblogs Inc, set up by Jason Calacanis. Over here, Shiny Media has been trying to give the blogzine idea a British spin.

As part of the research for the project, let's look at a number of blogs put together by these companies. Here's a few you could try.

Gawker, Jalopnik, Idolator and Defamer - all Denton blogs.

Slashfood, DS Fanboy, The Cancer Blog and Engadget - all Weblogs Inc productions

Corrie Blog, Bridalwave, ShinyShiny and Pop Junkie - all Shiny Media blogs

I want you to look at some of these and get answers to the following questions.

• What's the blog about, who is it aimed at and why would they read it?
• How often is it updated, what kind of things does it cover?
• What's the style/tone/attitude of the posts? Who writes them?
• How does the blog use links? Multimedia? Audience participation?
• What do you think of the design?
• Do you think the blog makes money? if so, how?

OK - once you've had chance to think about this, we'll pool ideas. What I want you to do for next week is go off and think of an idea for a commercial blog like the ones you've just looked at. Next week, we'll split up into groups and have a pitch session.