Tribune on blogs
: My colleage Denise Polverine, editor of Cleveland.com, asked the jackpot question of the Jack Fuller session at Online News. I’m proud to say that she first plugged our hyperlocal blogging efforts and then she asked Fuller about Tribune journalists blogging.
Hems begats haws.
“There are a number of issues,” Fuller said. “If you have somebody whose name is part of your newspaper and they blog, unedited, there is a potential quality-control problem.” He immediately acknowledged that it’s really no different from a correspondent talking on TV — unedited. If you have a fool reporter, there’s a “quality-control problem.”
He says there is another issue: economic — “how the income gets cut up.” Well, if a reporter blogs as part of his or her job, that’s not an issue. If it’s outside, then the reporter will surely not make any money to cut up.
But then he acknowledged: “There is everything right about people at the paper being in more continuous engagement with the audience.”
Damn right.
: I just saw that Mary Hodder blogged this on my comments before I could. She says:
I have to say, I don’t think he gets it. Blogs are about trying to find as much truth as possible, to be fair and accurate, to get as close to meaningful information as possible, but they are not impartial, and we, the audience are desperate to know what people think, especially those that have developed expertise in a particular area, with access and time (because it’s their job..) to things we don’t have time for, to hear their comments and to be able to comment back. We, the audience, understand that blogs are partially journalism, but also opinion, constantly iterated, and the usefulness is in this more temporal aspect. ….
Damn right.
News is a conversation.
Let’s say that again and etch it in brass:
News is a conversation.
