Online Journalism 1 - Weblogs and Journalism

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.

Research commercial blog networks

One of the things we're going to be doing over the next few weeks is setting up some blogzines. Wew'll work in groups to do this.

The idea is to get you having a go straightaway at creating a commercial blog that, in theory, could attract an audience of interested readers and even draw in some advertising. We'll work in groups of 4-6 - we'll decide once we've come up with some ideas. The aim will be to run each group blog as if it were a going concern for one week. You'll need to set up the blog, sort out the design, develop an editorial approach and style and then plan and manage regular daily update for one week.

What we need to do now is some 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 competition in the US came first from Weblogs Inc, which was set up by Jason Calacanis but was then bought by AOL. Another key player in America is Federated Media, which was set up by John Batelle. Over here, Shiny Media has been trying to give the blogzine idea a British spin.

There are other smaller operations trying to set up blog networks - Dead Horse Media in the US (its best known blog is Dealbreaker, which covers Wall St) and MessyMedia over here, which has just started (its first blog is Westmonster)

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

Gawker, Jalopnik, Idolator , Jezebel, Valleywag, The Consumerist, Lifehacker and Defamer - all Denton blogs.

Slashfood, DS Fanboy, DIY Life, Green Daily, Cinematical and Engadget - all Weblogs Inc productions

43 Folders, BoingBoing, Cool Tools, Search Blog, Tech Dirt, Trend Hunter, Silicon Alley Insider and Uncrate - all Federated Media sites.

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? When 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 and see if we can identify some differences between the way each of these businesses approaches commerical blogging.