'Challenge journalism'

It's a clunky sounding label, I know. It refers to a strand of modern journalism in which writers set themselves a challenge of some sort, then document their progress in meeting that challenge.

There are connections here with the kind of new journalism and immersive journalism you're looking at with Rod. Writers doing 'challenge' pieces put themselves at the centre of their stories. They often try to place themselves in different worlds, with a view to revealing something new or important to the rest of us.

The most high profile example of this kind of thing is Morgan Spurlock's 'Supersize Me', in which he ate only McDonalds food for thirty days to see what effects it would have on his health. But newspapers and book shops are now full of this kind of thing - people who try to spend a year living according to the precepts of the Bible, or a year without shopping or a year without having sex or a month without looking in a mirror.

The idea is to do (or not do) something that we all do and take for granted with a view to revealing something about modern life. These stories often take modern consumerism as their focus.

As with new journalism, some critics have suggested that challenge journalism is a bit narcissistic and self-involved, that it's often a rather artificial and cheap way to get a story, that the journalist is often running a rigged experiment in which the conclusions are programmed in advance...

We can talk a bit about this today. What I want to you to think about is whether this kind of thing is well suited to blogs. Blogs are time-based. They're diaries, essentially. So they could work well as a tool for challenge journalism.

Some journalists who wrote challenge books used blogs to document their progress (and generate publicity) - for example, Neil Boorman, who wrote 'Bonfire of the Brands', a book about trying to live a brand-name free life, but kept a blog while he was doing it.

Others started off with a blog which then became successful and led to a book. For example the award-winning American blog, the Julie/Julia Project, in which the writer sets out to cook all the recipes in a famous American cook book.

Another interesting example is The World in One City, a blog based project in which the authors set out to see if they could find people from every nation in the world living in London.

That blog is almost like a quest - it has a definite aim/end. And indeed, it's over now - on the way, the bloggers got a lot of media coverage which gives you an idea of what they were up to. Others adopt a tighter subject focus but a more open ended structure - for example, eggsbaconchipsandbeans, a blog reviewing greasy spoon cafes.

Have a look at some of these - they might give you ideas for your assessment blog.