Lots of newspapers (including the one I work for) are experimenting with blogs, and plenty of other publications are too such as Business 2.0 magazine, where editor Josh Quittner told all of his writers they should have blogs (he also said that he would be giving them bonuses based on traffic, which I wrote about here). Its not surprising that Josh did that, of course, considering one of his star writers who also had a blog Om Malik left to turn that blog into a mini empire.
But should every reporter or writer be a blogger? Joshs rationale for asking his writers to become bloggers makes a lot of sense to me: in a nutshell, he said that blogging would help to keep his writers connected to their readership through comments, among other things more in tune with their beats and areas of interest and just generally more engaged. And thats definitely the idea behind getting a journalist to blog. But is it going to work for everyone? Probably not.
Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests has a good post on the topic (and no, Im not linking to him just because he said nice things about me). And one point he makes which I cant stress enough is that in order to have a good blog, you have to really want to do it. Not everyone is going to feel that need. As Tony says:
To blog actively, regularly, and in a way that is engaged with its readers and the blogging community-at-large requires a level of commitment that might transcend the definition of a job â€" particularly if you are doing so in ADDITION to your usual duties.
One of the things Josh did was to tell his writers to blog about business, but also to blog about whatever else they were interested in; so one writer who likes to surf writes blo posts about surfing as well as business. Thats a smart move. It is still a time commitment, however, and one that not every writer is going to want to or even be able to make. And I will say this: if you force them to blog anyway, then their blog will inevitably suck just like these ones.
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