At the Society of Editors Conference in Bristol this week, Robert Peston said he wasn’t a ‘proper blogger’ insofar as he did not use his blog to speculate. But in our most recent online lecture at Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Adam Tinworth told us that the least important thing you could possibly include in a blog is your opinion on what is going to happen or has happened.
The reason for this, he said, was A) because a specialist on the topic on which you are writing may vocally disagree with you, and B) because hearing somebody rant and rave about their own personal thoughts is annoying. Links, photos, videos, context, and discussion with readers were five key things he said were more important than opinion. With the exception of video posts, Peston seems to be doing a good job at covering all of these things – so I’d give him two thumbs up.
Peston himself highlighted three key attributes of the blog in his speech: A) you “can get stuff out there very quickly,” B) you can put a large amount of detail in the blog that “(you) can’t get into a three minute bulletin,” and C) from the reader feedback provided, you can “complete the story more quickly.”
As a case in point about the power of the internet, Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural School was reporting the speech as it happened live from the Society of Editors Conference, where students published sound-bites from his speech over twitter and #hashtags from their mobile phones, so that readers could hear bits of the story before it even reached the newsroom.
Clarence Mitchell, spokesman for Kate and Gerry McCann, described blogs and forums as “the lynch mob gone digital” and said they had been “hostile and negative,” helping to spread the backlash against the McCanns and cause them added hardship.
But Kate and Gerry McCann are no strangers to the internet, and have used it themselves to help attract media interest and support in the search for their daughter. Gerry McCann keeps a blog, and an official website has been created that bares various different domain names – http://www.bringmadeleinehome.com/, http://www.findmadeleine.com/, http://www.cuddlecat.co.uk/ to name but a few.
When it comes to blogging, social networking, using forums, and communicating online generally, problems only tend to arise when people use it to talk too freely and forget that the online medium of communication is based around people that are just as “real” as those that you would meet face-to-face. So the same standards of journalism and taste should be applied.
As Robert Peston said at the Society of Editors Conference: “I apply exactly the same standards of verification to a blog as to anything else I do.” This is something we should all do, because the internet is real life.
