The Daily Blog
: WashingtonPost.com’s Dan Froomkin writes a very instructive piece for editors of online news services. Among its many good ideas is a love song to blogs:
Consider if you were starting a “newspaper” today. Wouldn’t you want to facilitate exchanges with readers? Wouldn’t you want to encourage your readers to find out more than what you can publish? Wouldn’t you want to make it easier for them to take action? Wouldn’t you want to define and create a community? Wouldn’t you want to make your readers feel important?
Blog tools give you all that — not to mention the ability to easily and quickly post something you just found out about. (What could be more journalistic?)…
So I think that at least a portion of every online news site’s home page should be turned over to some sort of blog space, where journalists can post items and readers can post comments, effective immediately. Try it and see where it takes you….
The most successful blogs all have something in common. Their authors are unashamedly enthusiastic about the topic at hand. (Often, of course, they’re outraged.) The lesson: There is no virtue in sounding bored online.
Online, journalists should not conceal their fascination for the topics they cover. They should not hide behind the traditional bland construction of news stories. They should still be fair, of course, but they should also have voice and passion — and sometimes even outrage. There is a risk here that the line between news and opinion may get blurry, but so be it. We should be turning our online journalists into personalities — even celebrities — rather than encouraging them to be as faceless as their print colleagues. The Internet demands voice.
Hows would you incorporate blogs into the news sites you read (or, for that matter, don’t read)?
