Online Journalism 1 - Weblogs and Journalism

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.

Who's online these days?

And what are they doing these days... We didn't get round to looking at this last week, so let's start with it this week. I want you to find out who's using the net now and what they use the net for. I also want you to find out how the net population has changed over the last decade. Think of this as audience research for the blogzine project we're going to do over the next few weeks.

BTW I posted some links last week that might help - ignore all the stuff about weblog history - we'll get to that later in the unit.