Donald O'Mahony's Comm 361 class blog

As professor Klein always says, the news wants to be free. This chapter says that news now wants to be analyzed, shared and commented on. It is becoming more of a conversation. This is a good thing for journalism, but the chapter raises three questions.

• How do journalists participate in the conversation without sacrificing their objectivity or credibility?
• What about legal and ethical issues now that everyone can publish anything they want on a professional news site?

• What happens when you really want the audience to participate, but they don’t?

A conversation can be found on almost any modern news website. Look no further than the comments section. Journalists will have to deal with the offensive comments that are sure to show up,  but that is just part of the business now. Learn to sort through the mess and find the useful comments.

Image courtesy of Newton High School Blog

Kelly McBride is the ethics group leader for The Poynter Institute. She gave some suggestions for using social media:

• Use social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook because familiarity with the tools is important
• Be mindful that you represent more than just yourself. Even if you are an individual journalist, the stakes are higher than with other professions
• Presume your tweets, status updates or other content on these sites will go further in terms of reach than you intend for them to go
• Ask your boss to follow you on Twitter because it’s a good accountability measure

The chapter says the the link is the primary building block of the digital age because it connects one piece of information to another. The secondary building block is comments or contribution. People contribute more to online news than just comments, including photos, video, message board posts and blog posts. This is a good way to make the story better.

Bradley Horowitz came up with the 1-10-100 rule while  working as a senior director at Yahoo. The rule states:

• 1 percent of the user community, including the journalists on news sites, actually create content
• 10 percent of the user community will “synthesize” the content by posting a comment, e-mailing a link to a friend, authoring a blog post on a separate site and linking back to it, voting it up or down, etc.
• 100 percent of the user community will benefit from the actions of the first two groups

It would be smart to use these ideas as advice. Social networking is a good way to build a following and find sources. Just make sure to keep control of the conversation as much as possible. Set guidelines for participants, monitor offensive postings, know your legal responsibilities and correct errors. These steps will bring you better credibility.

A blog is an important tool for a young journalist. Many working journalists have blogs on top of their traditional stories, so it can’t hurt to start early. This chapter gives advice for starting and maintaining a good blog.

The three characteristics of a blog are:

• A frequently updated website that displays entries in reverse chronological order.
• Each entry, or post, has a headline and a body. Many contain links, pictures or video.
• Contains a place for readers to leave comments, although some blogs leave this part out.

Blogs make it possible for anyone to publish stories or information and share their thoughts and ideas on different subjects. They have helped journalism to become more immediate and interactive. Stories can be easily published as soon as possible without having to go through an editor. However, this increases the importance of self editing.

Before you start a blog, you should read a few to get familiar with the style. It is also important to get aquainted with the terminology:

• Post — entry on a blog.
• Permalink — a link on each post that directs readers back to the post, helpful for people emailing links to your blog.
• Trackback — lets bloggers know when others are linking to their material.
• Blogroll — a list of sites the blogger frequently visits that is located on the sidebar of the blog. Helpful for readers.

Making a blog is easy if you have a plan. Decide on a name, a description and what to write about. Blogger.com and WordPress.com are the two sites the book reccomends, although there are other options. After you have a name, it is time to pick a theme. Blogger and WordPress have their advantages when it comes to themes, so decide which is better for you.

Once you have a blog, you need to get readers. It is important to write quality attention-grabbing headlines, publish quality posts regularly and becomes active in the blogging community. Nothing bad can happen from commenting on other blogs and it might just get you a few new readers. You should also make an effort to update your blog daily.

There are a few things that can be done to make your blog more appealing to readers. It is good to have a specific topic so that your blog becomes a dependable source within the chosen topic. Posts should be scanable and include links and pictures. An RSS Feed is also a useful tool to include on the sidebar of your blog.