Ways to use your blogs

Would-be journalists can use blogs in various ways.

As a showcase for your work

Blogs offer 'push-button personal publishing'. You can write what you think and publish it immediately, for the rest of the world to see. So the first use for blogs is as a way to get your writing/ideas/stories out there.

Beyond this, if you're already writing for established sites/publications, a blog can work as a kind of online ‘cuttings file’. You can put the things you write on your blog. If you write something for another site, you can link to it.

The American journalist Clive Thompson does something like this on his blog, Collision Detection. If he writes something for the New York Times or for the online companion to Wired magazine, he'll put links and sometimes the full story on his blog

Even if you're not being published 'officially', a blog can still be a useful showcase. If you want to write a particular kind of journalism (music reviews, football news), start doing it on your blog. If you keep at it, you'll build up a selection of work you can then show to editors of both online and real world publications.

As a place to develop your technique and ideas

Writing regularly on your blog will help develop your basic technique and your personal style. With things like reviewing, editors are looking for an interesting take and a distinctive style. You can use your blog to help develop those.

Think of it as a kind of ‘mind gym’, a place where you can test out styles and ideas, where you can tone and hone your prose style. Blogs allows for a kind of thinking aloud in public – just writing a post can sometimes help you figure out what you think.

Lots of high profile writers use their blogs in this way - for example the American science writer Steven Johnson has written about how writing his blog (and responding to comments) has helped him develop ideas.

As a vehicle for ‘personal reporting’

Lots of blogs are very personal affairs. People write about their relationships, their jobs, their families and more. This may sound mundane, but many blogs that specialise in ‘personal reporting’ are well written, entertaining, illuminating and newsworthy. Good enough to appear in the mainstream press, which has an obvious appetite for ‘confessional writing’ and specialist columns that lift the lid on specific professions/workplaces.

Blogs are a good place to practise that kind of journalism, develop your style and potentially even build an audience. The most popular workplace blogs – Call Centre Confidential, for example, now sadly defunct – are read by lots of people and have received mainstream attention as a result. We’ve talked before about how there’s space for a blog that details the realities of modern student life – from dealing with debt to working to supplement the student loan.

As a media filter

In the mainstream media/press, there’s an awful lot of coverage about other coverage – press digests about what other papers are saying, TV shows about other TV shows. Blogs are built for this kind of journalism – ‘media filtering’. As you read things online, you can link to them and give your take on them. For many people this is what blogs are all about. They’re a way for ordinary individuals to participate in the media and feedback their views, even take over and develop certain stories.

Journalists need to be highly media literate, aware of stories and trends, able to offer their own take or angle. Blogs let you develop and showcase this skill. If you direct people to interesting stories online (and/or offer an interesting interpretation) people will enjoy and return to your blog.

As a research tool

Blogs offer a great way to keep track of things you find online – and the ideas you have about them as you’re browsing. As you find and read things, you can make notes and link to the story on your blog. That way you have a record of what you were thinking about. The American SF writer Cory Doctorow refers to blogs used in this way as 'outboard brains'.

Crawford Kilian (a specialist in writing online) has an interesting research blog tracking news coverage of Avian Flu – he’s done it to keep himself informed. But his blog is turning into a useful general resource.

These kinds of blogs can help people pool their research. For example, say you were trying to track media coverage of student attitudes to the General Election – you could create a blog, then work together to post links to different stories you found in different news/media sites, with your comments. By working together, you’d soon build up a really useful journalistic resource.

As a way to build contacts and develop your social network

Bloggers love to comment on, and link to, other blogs/sites. As you do that, you build up potentially useful contacts, people who may refer other people to your journalism and help raise your profile in general. Some bloggers leave comments on big news/media sites, often with a link back to their own blogs. A few have succeeded in creating a lot of traffic as a result – some have even got work as mainstream media pundits as a result.

So there’s a careerist benefit that can come from using your blog as a social networking tool. Beyond that, this kind of social networking can enable a new kind of collective journalism, in which a group of people work together to develop a story, find out more abut something already covered in the media, or perhaps even expose/correct mistakes.

An old example of this, from a few years back, is the way bloggers/contributors to MetaFilter worked together to expose what’s become known as the Kaycee Nicole Cancer Hoax – you can still read some of the original Metafilter threads in which people discuss the story.