Blogging comes to ITV Local
ITV Local Yorkshire has a new blog. I started an informal one a few months back on blogger as an experiment and we all felt it was something we wanted to do. But the idea that you randomly write posts and leave it to find an audience was not going to work.
HQ brought in 1000 heads (excellent people may I say) who have come up with a new design and have been grooming us in the art of blogging. I’m realising it’s quite a commitment. There’s no point in doing this unless we are properly part of the blogging landscape – contributing to conversations in the blogosphere (see I’m learning the terminology), establishing links, putting out opinions and little emotional nuggets that readers can propagate in conversation.
In my hunting around for ideas I came across this post by coppyblogger about how to stop being invisible. “Telling people exactly what they want to hear feels… dishonest. Get over it.” is one of the pieces of advice. Blogs are a distraction, they say.
These notions don’t sit comfortably for blogs from within serious news organisations, but news organisations are adapting, it seems. I have talked to a number of our journalists about contributing to the blog and they are quite understandably nervous about blogging. Here are the top three responses; 1. It’s personal and often seems to require the exposure of a personal position on a subject. 2. What if I get inundated with comments and can’t deal with them. 3. It’ll be a commitment and I’m already overworked.
Anyway keep an eye on our little blog – noting that we don’t yet have an assignment of heavyweight contributors, just me and jack.
