E-Media Tidbits

In the article "Snoring Out Loud: Statesman blunders with bland blogging" written for the Austin Chronicle, Kevin Brass casts a critical eye at the blogging efforts of the Texas capital's main daily newspaper, the American-Statesman. (I'm quoted oh-so-briefly in his piece.)

His focus on the Stateman's public blog site, designed to let anyone blog, helped me re-focus on the model of news websites setting up free services where anyone in the community can set up a blog and have it hosted by the news organization. I think there's a key flaw in this type of model, as it's typically deployed.

The problem: Many people within any community already are blogging, using popular services like Blogger, LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, etc. Is a newspaper going to convince those people to switch their blogs over to the paper's website? Unlikely.

For a news organization to have a truly effective public blogging service, I think it's important to not only offer to host new blogs (as the Statesman website does), but to welcome existing bloggers in as well. That means figuring out how to incorporate Blogger/LiveJournal/MSN Spaces/et al blogs into the mix.

That can be as simple as using RSS to feature new posts from external blogs by community members. A Public Blogs page would be improved, I think, by having a larger mix of community bloggers -- some blogging using the news organization's blogging technology, others using external services. The walled-garden public-blogging approach doesn't make much sense in a world where third-party blogging services are so widely used by members of your community.

Yes, this is a bit of a leap for traditional news organizations, for it means there's less control over the content of blogs hosted by other services. But is it really? If you don't like the content of a community member's external blog, simply don't feature it.