August 6, 2003

In The Future, All Reporters Will Blog

Or, at least, they should - it's just a better tool for reporting, for interacting with readers, and for tapping into new sources of information and providing readers with a better finished product. Increasingly, some in newspaper management seem to agree.

Editor & Publisher has a very good Q&A with Ken Sands, the managing editor of online and new media at the The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash. Sands discusses how weblogs - "blogs" - will increasingly be a feature of newspapers' websites, and why that's a good thing.

I do believe the "amateur" warbloggers showed us professional journalists the power of numbers on the web. That is, if an army of "reporters" scour the web to "aggregate" the news, why can't we use our local readers to help us aggregate the news of our communities? How about an army of local bloggers?

The best of their work might even show up in print! At the very least, by tapping into readers as sources, we will be in better touch with our communities and will get better stories.

At The Spokesman-Review, we think of a "blog" as a template, really, for publishing on the web in various forms. The template allows frequent posting in reverse-chronological order with the ability to link. Sounds pretty simple, and it is very flexible. Our entire war coverage on the web, for example, was handled with a blog template.

In the past couple of weeks, I've given presentations on interactivity at two metro dailies. The staffs of both papers were excited about the potential for blogs, and both immediately began making plans for their own. I feel a little bit like the Pied Piper of blogging. I think that in the future, you will see that either: 1. Everyone starts blogging; or, 2. They will blog but call it something else.