This internal memo on blogging guidelines at the Washington Post is still wafting round; there's little in here to disagree with but I bet there are still few editorial departments that take the time or trouble to actually get this stuff on paper. Or on screen.
The two pages start by listing what works:
- A news column or opinion blog with one or two contributors.
- A breaking news or event-orientated blog with one editor and a range of contributors.
- A single issue blog with one or two contributors.
- Blogs with a strong voice or tone.
- Blogs where writers are supported by editors.
What doesn't work:
- Group blogs with no focus.
- Blogs that lack voice.
- Blogs that aren't updated at least twice a week.
- Blogs that are a dumping ground for notes that won't make the paper.
John Pomfret, WashPo's Outlook Editor, elaborates on these with nine points editors should consider when proposing a new blog.
- Blogs should focus on one topic or area and be clearly defined.
- It will need a strong voice or focus that makes it stand out from the competition.
- "Some of the best blogs have a live and fresh feel precisely because they take readers outside the news." Blogs should supplement what appears on the rest of the site and in print.
- Update a least once a day.
- Agree a site editor.
- Agree a comment moderator: comments account for 10-25% of a blog's traffic but need to be monitored.
- Develop a promotional plans, including networking with other relevant blogs.
- You'll need a strong and original idea for a name.
There is far more potential in blogging than we have seen so far; it is still the most web efficient, reader-friendly content management system we have, and there is a wealth of new micro-blogging, instant messenger and social networking tools that we have only used very crudely so far. Any guidelines or observations on the way have to be helpful.
The BBC's blogs
Robin Hamman, the BBC's senior community producer, wrote this week about the corporation's 18-month-old blogs network. The project was basically a formalisation of a few existing BBC blogs, including Ouch, Island Blogging and Nick Robinson's Newslog. It launched in April 2006, and the BBC claims to have built an audience of 7.4 million unique users each month, spending an average four minutes each.
Hamman acknowledges some serious technical problems with the network as it has grown, much of it caused by spam comments that can number 50,000 in a week, but promises that upgrades are on the way.
On the plus side, blogs have started to be integrated into programming, with Newsnight and World Have Your Say using blogs to feed back ideas from users.
BBC News website editor Steve Hermann added that the tenth BBC correspondent's blog launched this week, with Justin Webb in America.
"Over the past couple of years they have quietly changed the way in which the best of the BBC's journalism gets out to our audiences," he wrote.
"There have been some fine moments on Nick's blog, most memorably the time when he blogged as he was 'eyeballed' by President Bush at a White House press conference, or when he explained (in what some readers told us was too much detail) how he'd had to get from being naked in bed to interviewing the home secretary in the space of just seven minutes. Thus helping prove that blogs are even more informal than TV 'two-ways' (interviews between presenter and reporter)."
Source: mediabistro.com
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