September 27, 2007

Less ACK

The Nashville Scene reveals how the new regime at WKRN is altering its approach to the blogosphere.

The station has also made relatively sweeping changes in the way it uses blogs, eliminating a substantial number of them, creating a new one for reporters' outtakes and reining in others to avoid opinion or personal references that stray from content. In particular, the blogosphere has been prolific in its protestations that political aggregator A.C. Kleinheider, the man behind WKRN's Volunteer Voters, has been "neutered" from peddling his political conservative ideology, relegated instead to pointing to content and posing questions for readers.

"My idea about blogging is less about people's individual home lives and more about trying to give transparency to content…and to give people an opportunity to get involved with content in a way they can't on the air," [WKRN general manger Gwen] Kinsey tells the Scene. "From a news organization's standpoint, an appropriate use of new media as far as I'm concerned for blogging is to provide an extension and a forum for back-and-forth with viewers. I know that part of the blogosphere locally has been trying to assess whether there's room for personal blogging with respect to some of what we did before…and, again, I just think that we can do something that has value and that's additive to our mission as a broadcaster without necessarily getting into the personal and the opinion."

Update: Here's a free suggestion to WKRN: Don't tone Kleinheider down - but if you're worried about "balance" and all that, add a liberal voice to the mix. Someone like Sean Braisted, for example.