Online Journalism 1 - Weblogs and Journalism

Research and development for your group 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 person nominated a blog editor needs to set the blog up on their account and then invite the other group members on to be contributors. The Blogger Help section has some advice 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...

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. You'll probably end up doing most of this next week. But once you get it done, you're in a good position to go live. So it might be good to think about it over the course of the week so you're ready on Friday.

Pitching

Today you're all going to have a go at an elevator pitch for a group blog idea. Don't worry about this. Look on it as good practice. You'll have to pitch ideas a lot when you go to work as a journalist, wherever you end up. Also, feedback from the group can be really useful and help you develop the idea.

Here's some areas you could cover. Remember, though, that the aim is to pitch the idea quickly.

• Don’t waste time - generally, you pitch to important/busy people. So prepare - get a clear idea in your head of what you want to say and why
• Right at the beginning of your pitch, summarise the essence of the idea and why it's a good journalistic use of the weblog platform. Then say who it's aimed at and why they would want to read it.
• Anticipate objections – it’s been done before/it’s too obscure/whatever. Counter these by suggesting a new approach – new material, a new angle, a controversial take etc
• Indicate why you think people in the class might be qualified to write it – detail your experience
• Try to give a flavour of what you might put on the blog and how it might develop

Today's session

We've got a lot to fit in. I might start by looking at some basic ideas about writing online. I've also got some exercises for you to do in class connected to this. I'm going to come back to this next week, so we'll probably only do this for the first half hour or so.

After that, you need to pitch your different ideas for the group blogzines. Once you're done, we need to decide on four or five, then assign groups. Once that's done, each group will need to do some basic planning for their blog.

You'll need to talk about the name and the design (think about the design template you're going to use and the page elements you'll include in that design).

You'll need to decide on an editorial approach and figure out where you're going to get your material from. You'll need to plan how often you're going to update and come up with some general ideas about the style of the blog, post length, use of links and multimedia etc.

So there's a lot to get through...

Federated Media's blog rate cards

Last week I gave you some interviews with Nick Denton (of Gawker Media), Jason Calcanis (formerly of Weblogs Inc) and John Batelle (of Federated Media) - the Q&As were all taken from a book called 'Blog!', which I'll write more about later.

If you read them, you'll see that, while they may be very enthusiastic about blogs as a journalistic form, even as a kind of artistic expression in Batelle's case, they all take a very business like approach. They're looking for ways to maximise potential advertising income from successful blogs. They talk about 'monetizing' the blog platform and the like.

For an example of what that means in practice, you could look at the rate cards Federated Media publishes for each of the blogs in its network - for example, Boing Boing, 43 Folders, Uncrate and Trend Hunter. Each rate card features ad rates, page view numbers and a quick demographic breakdown of the audience. It's sign that people now think about blogs in the same way as commercial print magazines - they're all about delivering audiences (or eyeballs, as they say online) to advertisers.

The New York Times on Jonathan Coulton

You probably haven't heard of Jonathan Coulton - I hadn't, til I read about him in The New York Times - they ran a long profile, called 'Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog', in their Sunday Magazine in May last year. It was written by Clive Thompson, who's a great writer - I've recommended his stuff to you before - his blog's excellent. (BTW you need to register with the NY Times to read the piece but it's worth it).

Anyway, I was thinking about the OK Go video which Tom reviewed on his blog and I remembered asking in class whether it was made by the band or the record company. Then I remembered that Thompson talks about OK Go briefly in his Coulton piece. Here's the relevant quote:

"When I spoke with Damian Kulash, the lead singer for the band OK Go, he discoursed like a professor on the six-degrees-of-separation theory, talking at one point about “rhizomatic networks.” (You can Google it.)

Kulash has put his networking expertise to good use: last year, OK Go displayed a canny understanding of online dynamics when it posted on YouTube a low-budget homemade video that showed the band members dancing on treadmills to their song “Here It Goes Again.” The video quickly became one of the site’s all-time biggest hits. It led to the band’s live treadmill performance at the MTV Video Music Awards, which in turn led to a Grammy Award for best video."

Thompson sees this as another example of the phenomenon he's investigating in the piece as a whole - the way the net changes the relationship between low level musicians and their fans, creating a more intimate relationship between them and creating a new sort of economics for the music business.

So via the net Jonathan Coulton has been able to find an audience for his quirky/geeky acoustic songs that's big enough to let him quit the day job and make a reasonable living. And, via the net, he's made his fans active participants in his success - they promote his music, help make videos and graphics and even get involved in organising gigs.

Thompson points out that there are opportunities and costs in all this. Coulton now spends a lot of time updating their blogs, responding to email, checking out fan videos on YouTube. Then again, without the net and the relationship it enables with his fans, he perhaps wouldn't have been able to develop a musical career. Another key quote from the piece:

"This is not a trend that affects A-list stars. The most famous corporate acts — Justin Timberlake, Fergie, Beyoncé — are still creatures of mass marketing, carpet-bombed into popularity by expensive ad campaigns and radio airplay. They do not need the online world to find listeners, and indeed, their audiences are too vast for any artist to even pretend intimacy with.

No, this is a trend that is catalyzing the B-list, the new, under-the-radar acts that have always built their success fan by fan. Across the country, the CD business is in a spectacular free fall; sales are down 20 percent this year alone. People are increasingly getting their music online (whether or not they’re paying for it), and it seems likely that the artists who forge direct access to their fans have the best chance of figuring out what the new economics of the music business will be."

With artists and fans building new relationships (business and personal), it's interesting to think about how music journalists fit into this picture  and what their role will be in the future.

(The pic above was by Jennifer Karady and comes from the NYT).

Scott Rosenberg on 'the first blogger'

Back in the first session, I asked you to find out who the first blogger was. Lots of you have posted some interesting responses to this - Sophie has a good historical rundown plus pics of some of the early bloggers, Sean has a good timeline plus links, Michael links out to a good CNet piece on this subject, Paul argues that trying to find out who the first blogger was is kind of like blogging itself and Fabienne makes the point that a lot of you made - that although Jorn Barger may have coined the term 'weblog', that doesn't really make him the first blogger.

This whole question was a big noise in the blogosphere last year, around the (supposed) tenth anniversary of blogging. The Wall Street Journal wrote an intended celebration of blogging's tenth birthday but, because they named Barger as the first blogger, they caught a lot of flak from other bloggers keen to correct this claim (along with other mistakes). 

Scott Rosenberg, an author/journalist who specialises in technology (he used to work on the online magazine Salon) wrote an excellent round-up/response to this. Have a look and try the links if you want to see what various bloggers wrote in response to the WSJ. Rosenberg followed up with a really good piece about it all on The Guardian's Comment is Free in which he tries to sum up the main lessons of the row.

First up, he points out that trying to name 'Barger or anyone else as first blogger is a futile exercise'. You may be pleased that I set you off in the first session on a 'futile exercise'. But the idea was to bring out Rosenberg's key point:

"Like so many online innovations, blogging didn't spring fullgrown from some visionary's fertile forehead. It evolved as a bundle of online publishing practices; and as software developers created tools to make those practices easier, the form and tools advanced together."

In other words, blogging emerged as a result of actions on the part of lots of different people and institutions. It's still developing as the result of the new ways people are using blogs. Rosenberg sees the blog response to the WSJ story as an example of that. Sure, there was a lot of posturing in the row but at the end, if you look at the ideas bloggers came up with in response to the WSJ's misguided assertions, you end up with a better picture of how blogging developed.

Rosenberg goes on to say that:

Today, the blog - with its links, reader comments and archive page for each post - feels obvious and intuitive. It's the default format for a website.

It's an interesting point - blogs, with their time sensitivity/comments/privileging of the latest content/links etc have now become the way we expect certain sorts of websites to be - especially the websites produced by people in the journalism business.

(BTW The pic's from Scott Rosenberg's personal website)

Homework for this week

It's fairly simple - I want you all to try to come up with an idea for a Shiny Media blog and develop a quick pitch for it. Next week, we'll go over your ideas, chooose the best and assign the groups you'll be working in.

Analysing a Shiny Media blog

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

Here are a few Shiny blogs you could look at - Corrie Blog, Bridalwave, ShinyShiny, Shoewawa, Bayraider, Crafty Crafty, My Chemical Toilet, Who Ate All The Pies, Wii Wii and Hippy Shopper.

First of all, you need to decide what the blog you're analysing covers and who it's aimed at. Then look at posts over the last week.

• 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

Again, once you've got some ideas, note them on your classroom blogs. We'll try to pool some ideas at the end of the day.

Elizabeth Spiers on the media company of the future

If you read the hand-out I gave you last week - Clive Thompson's piece on the rise of blog networks and blog moguls, which ran in NY Magazine a couple of year's ago, you'll know who Elizabeth Spiers is. She was the first editor/writer on Gawker and Thompson (and lots of others) credit her with developing a distinctive style which is now mimicked by lots of other bloggers, whether they work for Gawker Media or not. Spiers went solo and set up various blogs - most recently Dealbreaker - and has written a novel.

Last December she wrote an interesting piece on the media company of the future for PC Magazine. Have a look at it - it might help you focus your own ideas for your group blogs.

Neil McIntosh on Valleywag

Here's an interesting take on one of Nick Denton's Gawker Media blogs, Valleywag, from Neil McIntosh of The Guardian. He starts by praising its coverage of the ongoing Yahoo/Microsoft deal or no deal thing but goes on to make some interesting points about VW's approach and style.

"What I find most interesting is how the blog combines news reporting with analysis with satire with too-much-detail-insiderishness, without missing a beat, and managing to get the choice right most of the time. It’s a trick many mainstream media hacks struggle to pull off even after years of practice, and some would even say they don’t have license to do it from cautious editors. But I suspect it’s what this emerging form of blog journalism is all about."

Give the whole post a read and look at the comments too - one commenter pointed out that VW's stories are inaccurate and that it unleashes tabloid-style attack journalism on people who are not exactly 'public figures.