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.