July 21, 2003

Let Reporters Blog!

Michelle Nicolosi, editor of Online Journalism Review, says newspapers should encourage their reporters to write weblogs.

More papers should think about setting up reporters with blogs. Working on them should be optional - not mandated - and reporters should be given the freedom to have a little personality in their blog, to link offsite, to post pretty much as they see fit. If they do a bad job, cancel it. But if you try to control it too much, the blog will not really be a blog - it'll be briefs. Newspaper style briefs are boring. They don't have the same appeal and won't draw the same kind of crowd as a personality-driven insider's look at a given topic.

Why? Because newspapers are organized around a model in which the newspaper controls the flow of information - it decides how to portray a 3-hour public hearing in 8 inches of copy, for example, or how to report the details of a hundred -page government document in 15 column inches. The newspaper model demands the reader trust the newspaper, sometimes on little more than blind faith.

Blogs gain trust by extensive linking to source documents, which few newspapers do either online or with footnotes in print..

Bogs represent a level of uncontrolled information flow that makes your average newspaper editor very nervous. And blogs linking to actual source documents gives many editors the willies. After all, if your readers can read the original documents, they'll more easily be able to spot the bias, the errors and the incomplete-ness of the 12-inch story.

Read the whole interview with Nicolosi - plenty of good insights about the Internet and the democratized digital future of journalism. [Hat tip: Corante.com