Journalists should use blogs as complement to stories
Here are some of her ideas to make blogging easier and turn it into more than just extra writing:
-Use blogs as notebooks. Journalists spend much time writing down interesting facts and angles that don’t make it into the published story. Write a quick blog blurb about it instead; readers may take interest in what “didn’t make it,” and the information will be saved online rather than buried in a notebook.
-Embrace the citizen journalism spirit of blogging. Journalists can post questions on their blogs to get real reader opinions and find out what angle of the story concerns readers most. Also, readers can aid research. Ask readers for information on a topic. An example from Gahran : If a journalist wishes to attend a public meeting on a topic, but he or she cannot, perhaps he or she can invite interested readers to attend, giving them possible questions to ask at the event. Readers can then post their notes on the blog.
-Promote an upcoming story. When writing a long-term piece, journalists can blog about how the project is progressing. This may also help with reader participation, as readers can offer more information if they have time to do so before a story’s release.
-Find a use for edited parts of stories. Blog interesting story parts edited out before printing; since they’re already written, this is an easy way to add a quick posting. Link to the whole story.
Source: Poynter Online
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I have friends at large dailies and they do feel that blogging is one more thing, a real burden. And they are not even real blogs, they say, because comments are not allowed. What fun is that?
And with the use of comments, trackbacks and pings, this is an excellent opportunity to incorporate user generated content. I realize msm is hesitant to risk the spam-generating, troll infested free-for-all that has been seen, but if WordPress can incorporate features to minimize such antics (I especially like the ability to require a certain number of moderated posts before a user can post without oversight), certainly an organization with a full time staff could muster a similar defense.
Spice
With high hopes that the print and electronic media anywhere in the world would pick up my real and authentic article for highlighting the miscarriage of justice and the manner in which the judiciary in India is working (!) I have created a blog "How to uphold dignity and honour to the judiciary in India?" and prominently displayed in Google website, gmail.com, yahoo.com, wordpress.com, ndtv.com, snehatv.com etc etc. I am at a loss to understand as to why no newspaper or TV channel has picked up the story. The media boasts that they are fearless and expose such crude attempts to undermine judiciary and why they have not played their constructive role to protect the tarnished and besmirched image of judiciary so far? Is it a hot potato that they can't hold it with a pair of tongs?
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