Links for today: Blogging and the BBC

Blogging

• Paul Bradshaw is blogging a series on how journalists are using blogs. Which is the same as what I'm doing really. So pretty darn useful. Here's Part One and you can use your own Internet initiative to find the others.
• Using a quote designed for Search Engine Optimisation, Andrew Neil says blogs are 'print journalism pornography'. He also said blogs were "entertaining". But in the race for the spot in journalism.co.uk's headline, this quote was clearly never in the running.
  
• Shane Richmond at the Telegraph has been asking the website's bloggers why they don't engage in comments.
  

BBC

• John Simpson says the future of the BBC is bleak. But he is kind of fond of the place.
• Re: Peston and that pesky blog. We've been here before - I pulled this article out of the World Wide bag the other day.
  
• And while we're on the topic Peter Preston in the Guardian says danger is lurking for the BBC's bloggers.
  
• Alfred Hermida on the BBC reaching out in online conversations.
  

P.S.

• An entertaining photographic 'fisk' of the Daily Mail.

The blog as scrapbook

A while ago, I interviewed Stuart Hughes, Defence and Security Producer at the BBC about his blog. I'm just transcribing it now.

In the interview, he describes his blog as a "scrapbook" - "a scrapbook for all the stuff that falls on the floor when you're working".

I've never heard anyone else describe a blog like this. Maybe a blog is more of an interactive scrapbook but I like the idea.

Blog: Genre? Literary Form? Medium?

Genre?

Carolyn Miller and Dawn Shepherd in Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog

'When a type of discourse or communicative action acquires a common name within a given context or community, that’s a good sign that it’s functioning as a genre (Miller, 1984). The weblog seems to have acquired this status very quickly, with an increasing amount of attention and commentary in the mainstream press reinforcing its status.'

Literary Form?

Kathleen Fitzpatrick quoting Himmer 2004 in The Pleasure of the Blog.

'It is, according to Himmer, the shared codes among bloggers and blog readers that result in this process of narrative completion that produces the primary experience of reading blogs, an experience that he understands as "a distinctive literary and creative mode, something richer and more nuanced than viewing it as simply the outcome of a specific toolset or formal structure allows for” (Himmer).

And, as he goes on to note, such an understanding of the "literariness" of blogs makes clear that this quality is not one "achieved by some weblogs and lacking in others.... This literary nature of the weblog is instead the loose set of shared criteria that allows us to speak of a plurality of ‘weblogs’ in the first place” (Himmer). All blogs, for Himmer, are in some sense literary, because of the nature of their readers’ interactions with them.'

Medium?

Danah Boyd in Reconstruction 6:4 (2006)

"Moving away from [a] content-focused approach...blogs must be conceptualized as both a medium and a bi-product of expression. This shift allows us to see blogs in terms of culture and practice. Furthermore, this provides a framework in which to understand how blogging has blurred the lines between orality and literacy, corporeality and spatiality, public and private."

Do bloggers think they're writing journalism?

Taken from a Pew Internet Research Project 2006, which was based on a telephone survey of American bloggers:

Only one-third of bloggers see blogging as a form of journalism. Yet many check facts and cite original sources.

• 34% of bloggers consider their blog a form of journalism, and 65% of bloggers do not.
  
• 57% of bloggers include links to original sources either “sometimes” or “often.”
  
• 56% of bloggers spend extra time trying to verify facts they want to include in a post either “sometimes” or “often.”

Links for today: The influence and history of blogging

Blogging - contributing to the crunch?

• Ok, so shares are tumbling, banks are being bailed out all over the world, and you really know there's a crisis when Iceland's economy is in meltdown. (Honestly, since when did Iceland become such an important cog in the global capitalist machine?) Anyway, I digress. When things go wrong, blame needs to be apportioned. So who or what to blame? Well what about Robert Peston's blog? This post apparently caused banking shares to fall the other day and here we see just how much influence Robert Peston has. (Take note of the tiny numbers on the graph).
  

A history of blogging

• Scott Rosenberg is writing a history of blogging. I'm looking forward to the publication and he talks to Mediashift about it here.

The Future of Journalism

• Dr Axel Bruns, an academic based in Australia, has been to a conference on journalism. He comes to a conclusion that could easily be misattributed to Jeff Jarvis:

"Overall, though, what also struck me during the event was the very blinkered vision of many in the mainstream industry. I got the sense that there's something not unlike Stockholm syndrome at work here - the longer you work in the industry, the harder is it to imagine any other way of working than by following the routines established long ago."

Twitter and BBC blogs continued...

In reply to yesterday's short offering, Tom Van Aardt (tomVS on Twitter - he's the Communities Editor at the BBC) has written a couple of posts on Twitter and the BBC's blogs.

The first is about Twitter and the potential for miscommunication.

"...there is no context on a microblogging platform. That’s sometimes the problem. Online all the other subtle forms of communication is lost - voice, body language, etc - and you’re only left with the words. In general a blog post (like this one) provides little information compared to a conversation, but it still provides vastly more information than a single sentence."

The second is a short justification of why he prefers Robert Peston's blog to 'official BBC News stories':

"All in all, it’s a more complete source of information than an unnamed BBC story. The fact that it’s a blog from the BBC gives me even more faith - to me it’s better than a usual BBC news story."

Here, in the latter quote, I think we see evidence of something of a culture change in the BBC's approach to the authority of information online.

In the distant past, the culture of attempting to remain impartial and objective meant the BBC tended to take the voice out of journalism. Most obviously this was seen in the reading of the BBC news which was always undertaken in a very neutral tone.

As Tom alludes to here, the philosophy of taking the individual out of news is also evident in the BBC website where most 'standard' news articles are not attributed to individual journalists.

The thinking is that the information carries authority because the biases, prejudices and opinions of the journalist have in theory been put aside to present the facts in a balanced and fair manner.

The thinking behind blogging runs counter to this idea and says that actually a piece of information can have more authority if we know who is behind it.

Hence, because Tom knows Robert Peston is writing his blog - an expert on the financial crisis and clearly in the know - the information carries more weight than if it was written by any other journalist at the BBC. The individual does make a difference. (Of course, the BBC brand still has a role to play here too.)

There may well be room for both approaches to news at the BBC and other organisations, and perhaps the key challenge is getting the balance right.

Indeed, I don't think the latter approach is entirely new. In both TV and radio, it's fairly plain the BBC has long recognised the importance of presenters and reporters developing what amounts to a personal rapport with the audience.

But I would suggest that the efforts to develop a more personal BBC presence online is also due to the influence of blogging on the thinking of those who work at the BBC.

Random Twitter Quote: The BBC blog post vs the BBC online article

tomVS Finding myself more and more reading Peston's blog for insight, as opposed to "official" BBC stories. http://snurl.com/4461h 25 minutes ago from twhirl