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React Publish your own item

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.
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