Are blogs in news organizations different than blogs owned by individuals? .. why a media organization needs a blog while it has its own tools to reach out to audience? Can blogging turn into a successful business model?
These questions and others were my main interest in the last 2 weeks as I went through the daily blog published by propublica.org.
Although Propublica started its blog last March, the new section achieved great success according the traffic numbers.
Propublica hired Marian Wang who is a young enthusiastic journalist who have excellent experience with new media tools in order to enable other investigative reporters to focus on their work.
By focusing on Wang’s work and with guidance from my mentor Eric Umansky who is the editor responsible for the blog posts, I understood how a media organization like Propublica can use blogging as a tool to increase online traffic.
The blog simply acts as a round up for any given big news story, by bringing the most important stories published and high quality work to readers following a certain beat.
Blogging is not just a new way for people to share their diaries and their opinions about wha
t happens in the world but it is a very effective tool to gather people who share the same interest and provide them with a daily or a weekly post that meets their interests.
Using blogs traditional media organizations can highlight their content by referring to previous stories and reminding the readers with it, or by highlighting new stories that might not be attractive enough for readers who didn’t click the headlines.
Culture of sharing
The best thing about blogging is that a blogger should practice the culture of sharing and using open web sources with his readers, there is no problem for a blogger in a media organization to post links out of his news organization, he can even refer to videos or podcasts created by some amateurs.
Blogging forces the media organizations to be more loyal to their audience by offering them the best around the web which is a drastic change in the old policy when newspapers and TV channels were competing to mark every story as exclusive.
The great concept of blogging can help many media organizations in Egypt including news websites where I used to work to develop their contents where blogs for long time was understood as space for biased opinions.
Great panel
In relation to blogging, I was fortunate enough last week to attend a panel organized by the Asian American Journalists Association in City University in New York.
Five female professional bloggers formed the panel to discuss one title “To blog or not to blog? That is the question”.
The Five bloggers told the audience about how they started as amateur bloggers and turned later into professional ones.
Blogging can be profitable in a way that allows a blogger to be independent and to work only on his blog relying on advertisements.
The five success stories were totally different and diverse, however it was easy for the audience to notice the common elements in every story.
Blogging needs commitment and time to gain success and I was inspired to start my own blog after returning back home in Arabic language.
1 comment:
I'm glad you are seeing what is good in the blogs. I find most of them are just people sounding off their opinions with almost no facts and no apparent interest in gathering any. Good to see you today, however clumsy the technology.
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