Two bloggers collide

The tinder:

by Sheila Lennon
'Bottom-up' journalism from the pros

May 10, 2002 • Today's weblog

Journalist bloggers walk the line: I like Dave Winer's "How To Start a Weblog (For Professional Journalists)," but there are a few caveats if you want to blog and stay employed.

From Tom Mangan's original Newsies site (the 2.0 version is cool, too), "Read all about us: This is a special report I wrote for Editor & Publisher explaining how journalists are finding it's a lot of fun to have a homepage, except when it gets you fired." This applies to weblogs too.

If it's your own site,
• You can't compete with your employer, publishing "alternative" news or stories your editors won't print.
• You can't reproduce work you've done for the paper -- your employer holds the copyright. If your paper has a paid archive, you may never get to put your work on the web.
• I love the dogma of DOGMA2000: "1.type as you think 2.don't care about your spellings, typos and cut-and-paste related mistakes ..." I practiced it in forums, and it was liberating not to fix typos. But others sent supercilious replies, many focusing on the errors rather than the content. All it did was let jerks feel superior. Reread what you write, fix errors you see, don't sweat the occasional typo.
• In any field, you may be fired for publishing material that embarrasses your employer. See Mangan's story.

If it's on the newspaper site, you know the rules:
• Some days, half the Daypop Top 40 is unsuitable for the "family newspapers" we blog at.
• You can't use a blogging tool that requires ftp passwords or access inside the firewall, or that makes your page look different or work differently from the rest of the site. It has to fit within your sites "content management system." And others need to be able to get in to "fix" any page. (I'm not sure whether any existing blogtools meet all these criteria, so I still use Dreamweaver, as you've read. I did write to the Macromedia bloggers to ask about a blogtool. Just boilerplate autoreply so far, but I remain hopeful that an email in a human voice may yet come my way.)
• You have to fix your typos.
• You buy your freedom by being good at what you have to do. (This is true everywhere in life.)
• It's not your site.

Either way, you may sometimes have to ignore an issue in your blog that you have strong opinions about, and say "no comment" when other journalists question you about it. <wink>

But that's the trade-off when you need a paycheck.
Link to this item | Comment

The flame:

Dave Copeland from somewhere in the middle of http://www.davecopeland.com/page16.html:

May 10, 2002 8:05 p.m.
Blog your own blog: In the backpacking world, there is a saying that goes "Hike your own hike." That means you need to do whatever you need to do to enjoy yourself on the trail, as long as it doesn't intefere with someone else who is trying to hike their own hike.

The blogging world needs such a standard--not the lists of rules some bloggers feel they need to preach to others. Maybe, being one of the few bloggers who has the clout to have a newspaper backing her, Shelia Lennon has the authority when she bats off a list of rules for journalists who keep web logs. But having the authority doesn't mean you have to--or should--use it.

Most of what she suggests is common sense ("You can't compete with your employer"), but, for some reason, it still irks me. For starters, the medium is still too new for self-declared experts to be preaching what's appropriate for other people to do. In fact, I'd argue the medium is too for any of us to be experts. And you may have noticed this about me already, I'm of the belief that rigid rules, guidelines and codes of ethics will only hamper the medium's ability to flourish.

Lennon does link to the much more useful "How To Start A Weblog (For Professional Journalists)." Again, mostly common sense, but it helps for techno-phobe journalists and I still wish I had read it before I started. I especially liked the suggestion of posting interview transcripts: no more complaining that a speaker was taken out of context.

The water:

Dave Copeland from somewhere in the middle of http://www.davecopeland.com/page18.html

Sheila Lennon, whose name I totally butchered in Friday night's entry, checks in:

"Hi, Dave,
"I was reading your blog and ran into myself there. Yikes.
"I like Dave Winer's "How To Start A Weblog (For Professional Journalists)" and I'm glad he's talking to young journalists.
"And I know that if I didn't do the blog on the newspaper site, with the caveats I ticked off, I probably couldn't write it at all. ("Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly." The Dalai Lama said that.)
"The headline, "Journalist bloggers walk the line" comes from this rueful perspective. Shoot, I'm envious that I can't write as freely as the rest of the bloggers can. (I buy those Powerball tickets to life on a beach with a laptop, maybe Jamaica.)
"But if that didn't come across, I screwed up. I'm genuinely sorry to have irked you. The burden to communicate was on me.
"I'm no expert, Dave. Subterranean Homepage News is only eight weeks old, and still feeling its way. If I have anything going for me, it's having spent so damn long on so many pesky learning curves.
"Here's the first one. This was written in 1990 after firing up my first 2400-baud modem and calling a few bbses:
"The social, political and educational possibilities of free networks linking thousands of people willing to share their expertise are exciting. School libraries could become community centers at night, with students helping their parents run programs that compute their income taxes, teach languages and skills. We could read any book ever written, even if there's only one copy in the world. We could publish with no middleman..."
(http://projo.com/cgi-bin/include.pl/aboutus/sheila/1990.htm)
"Now 500,000 people are publishing, and I (still) agree that they don't need a middleman, especially one that's sits in somebody's head, and for sure not me.
"Thanks for listening.
"Um...Dave, you spelled my name wrong!
"Best,
Sheila

"> Here's the first one. This was written in 1990 after firing up my
> first 2400-baud modem and calling a few bbses:

"Correction: That modem was a Hayes with a switch for 300 baud or 1200
baud, and I didn't know which one to choose."

Perhaps I was a little too harsh--blame it on the stress of an impending flight. Ultimately, you have to give Projo a lot of credit for embracing a new medium, unlike most newspapers that like to shit on web logs. I'll keep reading, Sheila, and I hope my readers will as well.