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The Daily Blog

9 comments on The Daily Blog

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)?

9 responses to “The Daily Blog”

  1. Tom Avatar
    Tom

    I’d start with the regular op-ed folks. For one thing, it would let them see the criticism right in front of them, rather than three days later in a “letter to the editor”.
    Of course, the op-ed folks have the most voracious readers, so would have to manage the comments regularly.

  2. Dave Schuler Avatar
    Dave Schuler

    Jeff:
    Mr. Froomkin is starting to get it but he’s not quite there.
    …where journalists can post items and readers can post comments, effective immediately…
    A good comments section is a dialogue with the commenters interacting with each other and the poster occasionally responding and re-focusing the dialogue. He’s just talking about a faster turnaround of stories and Letters to the Editor.
    I suspect we’ll have a long wait before conventional print journalists are ready to jump into—gasp!—interaction with their readers.

  3. Matthew Avatar
    Matthew

    Adding a comments section to every article is something that will become standardized in the future, imho. People want to interact and discuss things with each other. Not everyone hangs around in a bulletin board or wants to subscribe to newsgroups/listservs.
    Having a comments section (or linked page) is very empowering to the reader and also much more “sticky.” Some bloggers haven’t realized this yet, certainly most news sites haven’t as well.

  4. KMK Avatar
    KMK

    http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/27/technology/circuits/27blog.html?ex=1086235200&en=687ed8fbb3b711bb&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE
    Jeff – your quoted today in this NYT piece on blogs.

  5. MK Avatar
    MK

    It’s gotta start with the Ombuds-people first. Then Op-Ed.

  6. Ernest Miller Avatar
    Ernest Miller

    Actually, I would prefer that every news article link to some version of Technorati for that article. That way, readers could quickly see what blogs are responding to particular articles. Of course there are several ways to do this, but I think it would be more valuable than just allowing comments.

  7. Yogi Berra Avatar
    Yogi Berra

    “Adding a comments section to every article is something that will become standardized in the future, imho.”
    Some papers already do, and the response has been a loud thud. Some pilot programs from Gannett were deemed a waste of time. Most of the articles lack commnents, and there’s previous little indication that the vast majority of readers want to comment on the news. Only bloggers are egotistical enough to think that their opinion matters.

  8. Matthew Avatar
    Matthew

    “Some papers already do, and the response has been a loud thud. Some pilot programs from Gannett were deemed a waste of time. Most of the articles lack commnents, and there’s previous little indication that the vast majority of readers want to comment on the news. Only bloggers are egotistical enough to think that their opinion matters.”
    Isn’t that because most of them require registration to say anything? That kind of scheme will get you nowhere unless you have ~500,000 visits a day. Comments are extremely popular over on tech sites like the zd mags, newsforge.com or osnews.com.
    I also have to commend Jeff for allowing comments in his forum. Some blogs don’t allow them for argumentative reasons (can’t handle criticism, viz, “Wonkette”), know-how, or traffic reasons. Personally, I think everyone who blogs should allow comments.

  9. JD Lasica Avatar
    JD Lasica

    Isn’t the Washington Monthly an example (tho an extreme one) of what we’re talking about here? News sites wouldn’t (and couldn’t) give over their entire front pages like this, but a scaled-down version of this would be interesting.
    http://www.washingtonmonthly.com