“Blogging helps you better understand your audience. The hallmark of any blog is the ability for readers to post comments to what you write. By having this regular conversation with readers, you learn what hits and what misses.”

“For newspapers that are rapidly becoming irrelevant to a growing number of people, this is a huge issue. If you write post after post that garners no response, then it ought to be telling you something.”

“In print, we’ve been able to kid ourselves for decades that every reader is savoring every word of our prose. Online, it’s painfully clear what readers do and don’t care about.”

It’s true that as far as feedback and reader interaction, the blog experience opens a whole new channel for newspaper-reader communication. Yet feedback and blog comments can also be a misleading indicator: those readers who leave comments on blogs are not always representative of those who read news stories, and so forth. And if journalists spend all their time blogging and analyzing comments, they’ll have little time to work on the ‘real’ newspaper content.

Cobler answers back:

“The short answer is how do you find the time not to? Do you really want to become irrelevant?”

He reminds that a blog posting should take a mere 15 minutes per day – “if you want to say more, write in multiple parts.” Through hyperlinks, a blogger can also save him or herself valuable referencing and explanation time.

So, according to Cobler, everyone in a newsroom staff should have the opportunity to blog. At the Greeley Tribune, Cobler explains that every reporter and most staffers are encouraged to blog. Though some are “passively resisting,” by not blogging enough, the Tribune continues to push its staff in that direction.

As far as legal ramifications, the limits aren’t very well defined yet, but journalists should always be careful.

Experienced staffers already know much about libel laws, but less-experienced members should definitely have training sessions. Whether writing a blog or a print column, journalists are still speaking in the name of, and representing, their paper.

Websites, so far, aren’t considered liable for the reader comments that are posted. Most newspapers should adopt a policy: the Greeley Tribune’s is to post or hold comments, but never to edit them.

“As long as you don’t edit the comments, you’re OK,” wrote Cobler. Yet ideally, the Tribune is trying to establish a live commenting system, but this will require more safeguards and automated crosschecks and verifications.

So, should all journalists blog?

Source: greeleytrib.com through cyberjournalist.net