The River

The personal professional blog of Pamela Parker -- musings on marketing, advertising, media and technology.

Journalist + Blogger?

by

Interesting piece in Wired News about journalist/bloggers, like myself. A few thoughts:

  • On Scoops Of course I can’t scoop ClickZ on my blog. I’m paid to manage and write for the site full-time, therefore I must make it my first journalistic priority. This might be a bigger issue for print journalists (esp. magazine), because it’s fairly easy for us to publish something relatively quickly, and then I can link to it from my blog. It’s be tougher, psychologically, to sit on something while waiting for a monthly to come out.
  • On Objectivity I’m in a bit of a different position than some because while I write news, I also write opinions for ClickZ Experts, therefore it’s not entirely out of the scope of my role to be a person with opinions. However, I wouldn’t blog in an opinionated way about something I’d written as a News story.
  • On the Role of Blogging, for Me I try to make it clear (with my disclaimer on the site) that what’s on the blog are my opinions, not my employers’. To some extent, I blog about things that wouldn’t be appropriate for ClickZ (gecko/salamander sightings and other personal stuff). And as readers have no doubt noticed, I’m not a big ranter on my blog — at least not about things that we cover — and part of that is by design. If I didn’t have the regular news and column outlet, I might be more aggressive and depend more heavily on my blog.

    I think the steps Chris Allbritton (fellow alumni of my j-school) has taken to shift his blogging behavior after being hired by Time magazine — as described in the Wired News piece — are entirely appropriate.