PLAIGARISM, is a serious issue, and not one to be taken lightly by any self-respecting person of letters. As Morrissey sagely warbled back in 1986: “There’s always someone, somewhere, with a big nose who knows,
who’ll trip you up and laugh when you fall”
Hence, last week’s guest speaker, Adam Tinworth, has put me in a somewhat awkward position with his lecture: “Blogging: Reporting in the web 2.0 era”.
I now find myself having to explore a topic that I covered in my very first posting, so to avoid simply producing a rehash of an earlier work, I have to find a whole new angle to the subject of blogging.
Having never written a blog prior to starting my course, I was naturally intrigued to learn what Tinworth deemed as the key ingredients to a successful entry. These were as follows:
- Inquisitiveness
- Communication
- Honesty
- Enthusiasm
- Social engaging
- Informed
Hmm…seems like a lot to assimilate into a couple of hundred words each and every week! Worse still good blogs are apparently not supposed to be opinionated as this can serve to alienate a potential audience!
All at once, my deluded pretensions of becoming the next Charlie Brooker seemed well and truly dead in the water.
The other commonly cited tenet of blogging is that of its fundamentally reciprocal nature i.e. the blog post is a conversation, not a monologue. Again this troubles me as judging by my measly hit count, I might as well be talking to myself most weeks.
Bearing all this in mind I’ve decided to take a good long look at the different functions a blog can serve, as well as the variant types that exist.
Firstly we have the so-called “Reporters Notebook”- a public blog written by a journalist that features links, pictures, video as well as stories from the author’s beat. Although news never stops, pesky office firewalls can prevent a homebound journalist from posting updates or a breaking story. With a personal blog however this is no longer an issue.
Secondly we have the “Expert Blog”, which as the name suggests are written by specialists of a specific field i.e. law or medicine. Whilst a lot of blogs are rather amateur affairs, an Expert Blog can provide a more in-depth level of information to readers, and tends to encourage more user generated content rather than just links.
Finally we come to the “Group Blog” in which multiple authors cover a range of different topics with a single unifying theme. These are typically the hardest type of blog to sustain, as they require regular and numerous postings of high quality.
As tempting as it might be to view blogs purely as digital soapboxes, it’s increasingly obvious that they play as much a role in responsible journalism and commercial interests. If the impact of B2B journalism is anything to go by, blogs are going to increasingly be regarded as tools of the journalistic trade, rather than an auxiliary offshoot.
