Post’s Kurtz Blogs Media Notes

Washington Post media writer Howard Kurtz is now writing a weblog as an online supplement to his regular print and online columns, called Media Notes Extra. Kurtz says that his blog writings are copy-edited (“very lightly”) before publication, which puts WashingtonPost.com in the same camp as the website of the Sacramento Bee, which gained some celebrity for political blogger/columnist Daniel Weintraub, whose unedited weblog became edited after a flap on a particular posting. Also like Weintraub, Kurtz is doing his blog mostly as a sideline, “meaning I’m still supposed to do my day job, though obviously it’s a balancing act.” Kurtz also echoed a comment I’ve heard from Weintraub: “I find that writing the online column helps generate ideas for my dead-tree reporting.” So, since blogging is becoming accepted as a good thing by much of the newspaper industry, why is it that it’s still mostly a spare-time activity? Personally, I’d like to see that change and blogging become a paid part of the workday for people like Kurtz and Weintraub.