Online Journalism 1 - Weblogs and Journalism

Newspapers and blogs

Most big news media organisations now run several blogs. But are they any good? Is there any point to a big newspaper setting up several blogs?

A while back, Andrew Grant-Adamson wondered whether there was much point to many of the blogs newspapers were running back then. His post drew an interesting response from Shane Richmond, who blogs for the Daily Telegraph. He outlined all the things newspaper blogs could do...

Have a look at his post and see what you think of his list. He put it together a year and a half ago now. Are newspaper blogs doing all the things he suggests? Incidentally, two years ago, Richmond also put together a blogging style guide for Telegraph writers - it's definitely worth a look.

One last thing I'd like you to think about - how could newspapers use blogs to cover the news. Think about a big ongoing story like the environment. How could they use blogs to cover this in a different way - think about blogging as a form, what it does best. We'll talk about some of your ideas in class.

Are blogs good or bad for journalism?

Events like the cases we're looking at today have sparked a big debate about the effects blogs are having on the news. Some people are very positive - for example the technology journalist Dan Gillmor, whose book 'We The Media' develops the argument that the net is making journalism less like a lecture and more like a conversation and that can only be a good thing. He argues that blogs (and related personal media technologies) are bringing in a new form of public journalism, one in which the public is actively involved.

Some people disagree and see blogs as inaccurate, untrustworthy and biased, used by activists to spin the media their way. Some see blogs as a new form of alternative journalism, a kind of practical criticism of the problems and biases of big media. Others suggest blogs are just reproducing the excesses of establishment journalism and, anyway, have been incorporated and co-opted by the big companies.

Certainly, in the last two years or so, blogs have become an established part of the news media, both here and in the States. Some bloggers now wield real political influence. Two years ago now, The Guardian ran an interesting piece about some of the more popular UK blogs that cover politics. Bloggers over here haven't developed the same high profile (or quite had the same effects yet) as their US counterparts. But this piece is a way into some of the interesting discussions taking place online.

Some well know political pundits now host blogs for themselves and their Hollywood/media chums - the best known example is Arianna Huffington, whose Huffington Post blog is becoming more and more popular. It was the model for The Guardian's popular Comment is Free blog. When that site launched, the paper drafted Huffington in on the launch day to write a piece about why the 'blogosphere is now the most vital news source in America'. Have a look at that piece and think about what all this says about the current status of blogging and bloggers.

Is blogging still a tool for the little guy to talk back to the media? Or has it now become part of the media business as usual?

Blogs and the news media agenda

When blogs first became popular, it was clear that there were tensions between bloggers and mainstream journalists. Many bloggers were explicity critical of what they call the MSM - the mainstream media - and its biases and hidden agendas. Similarly, journalists were very suspicious of bloggers - and ofen very dismissive of what they wrote.

Over the last three- four years, there have been a number of celebrated cases in which bloggers have directly affected the news agenda and have, via their blogs, forced professional journalists to cover stories in a particular way. We're going to look at some of these cases today.

I'll split you up into groups and I want you to find out the story behind these four names

• Dan Rather
• Trent Lott
• Eason Jordan
• Dilpazier Aslam

Today's session

Today we're going to look at how blogs affect the news agenda. We'll look at some celebrated instances from recent history when bloggers have had a direct effect on big stories and new media organisations. We'll also look at how news media organisations use blogs and try to think about ways they might use them better.

There will also be time to work on your assessment blogs. I'm going to hand out some general notes about what we've covered on the unit that may help you when it comes to developing your blog. I'll also try to talk to all of you individually about how the blog is going.

Things to do for next week

I'd like you to do a couple of things for next week. First, if you haven't already done it, try to come up with an idea for your blog. You could perhaps think about the kind of approaches we've been looking at today.

Next, I'd like you to leave a comment on a blog you like or find interesting. I don't mean write a review on your blog. I mean write something in the comment area on the blog. Then write something about why you chose to comment in this blog on your class blog and link to your comment or the post you commented on - so I can look at what you've written.

Comments can be a great way of building interest in your blog. But you need to do it in the right way. You need to find a blog that perhaps has something in common with yours. You need to find a blog with a bigger audience than yours. You need to leave the kind of comment that will interest the blogger and cause them to come and look at your blog...

'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.

Personal journalism and workplace blogs

Today we're going to look at 'personal journalism'. This does sound like a slightly odd term. I'm using it to refer to the kind of personal writing you often find on blogs, in which people document their ordinary (or not so ordinary) lives. These kinds of blogs often feel very close to diaries - but because they're made public via the net, some of them can end up feeling close to 'journalism' or having a kind of journalistic effect.

That's only some of them. Most remain purely personal, designed mainly for friends and family. But some seem to become 'journalistic' in their effects, as more people read them and as the media pays attention to them.

One of the best examples of this kind of thing is workplace blogging. Lots of ordinary people keep blogs about their day jobs. These blogs are usually anonymous, to protect the bloggers from their employers. People use their blogs to moan about their jobs, share funny stories and let off steam. Most don't see what they do as journalism. But can they have a journalistic effect? Can we read them as journalism?

James Richards, an academic from Heriot-Watt University, is researching workplace blogs. He's written a good definition of what this sort of blog is and also has collected a good list of reasons why workplace bloggers do what they do.

Visit one of these links - you'll see he's put together a huge list of links to different workplace bloggers. I'd like you to look at a couple of workbloggers. Try to find one you like.

Read through what they say. Think about whether they're telling you anything new and whether you could class this as 'journalism'. Write a quick review and link to the blog you're covering. We'll talk about the things you find in class

Today's session

We've got a lot to fit in today. Last week I asked you to think about an idea for your assessment blog. Today, I'm going to try to talk to each of you individually about your idea and how best to develop it. I think that if you want to make the assessment less pressured, it would be a good idea to set up and start your blogs next week. That gives you more time to reach the target number of posts (20).

I'm going to quickly demo Wordpress to you as well. This is another free blogging service. Some of you are already using it. It offers a bit more functionality than Blogger, especially in terms of the media you can add to a blog. So it's worth looking at it and trying it out. But if you're happy with Blogger, that's also fine.

Next, we'll have a quick chat about how you managed with last week's homework - using Google Reader and Google News for a week to see if they changed the way you consumed journalism/news online.

Next, we're going to look at personal journalism and workplace blogs. We're also going to look at 'challenge journalism' and diary format features and think a bit about how they might work on a blog. The idea is to help you develop an idea for your assessment blog if you don't already have one.

Reading more online

In a post last week, I talked about the way the net can help you develop media literacy, can help you read much more widely and consume much more information. I mentioned a few tools that can help you with that - specifically Technorati, del.icio.us, Digg, RSS feeds and Google Reader, Google News and Google Zeitgeist and Google Trends.

This week, we'll have a quick look at these to see how useful they are. I want you all to set up Google Reader. You use the user name and password you use for your Blogger blogs. Then you can add RSS feeds to your account.

I also want you to personalise Google News - you can reorganise the way the news is show, add new categories of news, use key words to get tailored categories of news and also get Google to find news based on what they know about you from your searches.

We'll do all this in class and share a few ideas on how useful you find them. Once you're set up with Google Reader and Google News, I want you to use them both over the next week. Then write something on your blog about how useful you found both tools, what you got out of them, whether they helped you find out more etc.

Next, I want you to write a blog post about a current news story. The choice is yours - whatever you want. But I want you to link to five different news sites that cover that story. Some of these sites should be foreign news operations. Use Google News to find different perspectives on the same news story. In the post, I want you to explore the different angles that different publications or the news media of different countries take on events. Again, post that on your classroom blogs.

My Guardian piece about older people and the net

I'll come clean. Three and a half years ago, I had to do something close to the task I just set you. I was asked by The Guardian's technology supplement to write a piece about older people and the net. They wanted to know if more people were getting online and what they were doing. The brief was to a general look at this area...

I didn't have much time so I did all the research online. The piece I ended up writing was a bit rushed but I was able to find everything I needed online (though I did benefit from some of the contacts I'd developed before).

I'm writing this before you've done the exercise, but I'm hoping that you will have been able to find more info and more interesting sources than I did. If you look at the piece, you can see that some of the links I found are now dead - the domains have been bought up by ad companies or are being used by different organisations.