Clears empty bottles, crumpled paper, faded streamers, half-deflated balloons from desk.
The blog has been officially live for a whole 36 hours now and so far we are quite pleased with the response. Some kind people have said nice things about us. Naturally, some people are sceptical. The most common reservation seems to be that we are in bad faith - that this is not a real blog but rather a cynical (and/or misguided) piece of corporate brand extension.
What can we say? (Somehow I think "er..no it's not, please trust us" isn't going to do the trick. Although, "please give us a chance, read the blog for a bit and decide later whether or not we are being straight with you," might help.)
But on the question of what exactly is a blog, and more pertinently, whether or not an 'old media' institution is necessarily precluded from having one, I, as the Observer's online editor, have a view:
Grabs online editor's hat, pulls it firmly onto head, adjusts it at a rakish angle.
Blogging is a young medium, established by pioneers. They have established what the defining characteristics of a blog should be so far. Some of these are simply products of the available technology (most blogs use one of a handful of software applications), some are questions of idiom and tone. There may be accepted protocols about what feels and sounds like a blog, or at least a good blog. But there can't possibly be rules about who is allowed to try to honour those protocols.
If the Observer newspaper collectively wants to have a blog, onto which the journalists can post stuff about making the newspaper, it can. It has. But if that blog is then judged to be uninteresting it won't be read. It will languish in a dusty corner of the internet, visited only by charitable friends and relatives of the editors who want to find out what the news editor had for dinner.
All the usual criteria for the success or otherwise of a blog stand. You may not think this is a good blog. But we're pretty sure that a blog is what it is.
When we launched, we tried to address the question of our intentions with a mission statement. I also put some thoughts on blogging into a comment piece. Might I also recommend a great piece from last year by John Naughton, our Internet columnist and blog regular on the relationship between old school hacks and bloggers.
Oh, and one other thing, we really wince at the 'corporate' tag. And not because we are thin-skinned, delicate-souled liberals (although some of us clearly are). But because the Observer is owned in trust along with the Guardian and is not run for profit.
Gets up from computer, picks up the rather battered looking set of laurels.
Note to self: don't ever rest on those.
Updated Tuesday 1 March (on Hubris corner): Check out the comments. I shouldn't have said we weren't run for profit. Benjamin quotes the Guardian Media Group website:
"The Scott Trust own The Guardian Media Group plc. It is a board of 10 members who are chosen from areas of the media industry that reflect GMG's business interests. Its main aim is to ensure the commercial success of the Group and to uphold the Trust's values"
In my haste to express the public service-type vibe that the journalists here feel because of the Trust mandate I overstepped the mark a bit on GMG. Sorry.
See, blogging works. You make a mistake, you get busted.
I also corrected the spelling of cynical. And belatedly closed the brackets that I opened yesterday. So we're unlike an old school newspaper in one respect: No subs to correct our typos.
