Daily Telegraph blogs

Following the Blog Relations podcast about journalism and blogs, Marcus Warren, Deputy Foreign Editor at The Daily Telegraph newspaper in the UK emailed me asking for my thoughts on the newspaper's foreign correspondent blogs. Here are a few ideas, feel free to chime in,

I think it's great that the Telegraph is having a crack at blogging. I reckon before anyone starts a blog they have to figure out what the purpose of that blog is. Having blitzed through the Telegraph blogs you sent me, I'm not entirely clear what the Telegraph wants to achieve beyond a kind of correspondent's diary. Leaving design and convoluted web addresses aside for one minute, there are a couple of things that came to mind as I browsed the blogs.

The only links provided by the bloggers/correspondents that I could see were links to Telegraph stories. All well and good, but blogs are about linking out, spreading the love, joining that dreaded 'Conversation' thing. Reading the posts, I'm getting a sense that the powers that be at the Telegraph have told the correspondents, "OK, we want you to blog, but don't link to any non-Telegraph material." If this isn't the case, then the correspondents are not quite hip to how important linklove is.

Blogs are great for story leads, especially for Foreign correspondents on well known newspapers. If they're not already doing so, they should be getting involved with other bloggers on the ground. Meeting them, the good/reliable ones anyway. They should begin by commenting on their blogs, emailing, Skypeing etc. Global Voices is a good place to start researching who's who,

Look at other examples of good journo blogs. Meskel Square is great. It's written by a British journalist based in Ethiopia. He links out to other well known bloggers in the country and the region. He comments on stories he's covering, the political situation, anything and everything in Addis Ababa. Brilliant stuff. Note how he uses Flickr - the social photo sharing service. He also links out via his blogroll, in the right hand column, to other Ethioblogs. The Telegraph bloggers should be doing this too. They don't have to have a blogroll, but they can link from within their posts, get involved in the local banter.

The thing is, the Telegraph has these fantastic correspondents in these fantastic places, their blogs are country or city specific and as such they should function as places where people can come to touch base with the buzz on the streets, pick up what the local papers and bloggers are saying. Maybe highlight stories the Telegraph newspaper edition doesn't have the space to cover. It doesn't have to be in any great depth, but can link out to other bloggers and local newspapers for that depth. Whatever... don't just link to Telegraph stories. The correspondents need a bit more freedom to be creative and explore how to really get the most from their blogs. I can understand how linking out to competitors and non-Telegraph affiliated material might freak out the bossman, but if you don't you're not fully engaging with the blog space you want to be a part of.

However, and this is the tricky bit, the correspondents who are already blogging have to really understand how blogs work, how they interconnect and 'talk' to each other. I don't get the sense that the Telegraph bloggers really understand this aspect. It's not too difficult, but it's not that easy either. I still can't quite geddit totally myself and I imagine it could be a bit of a head frazzler for some traditional journalists. At the moment, the Telegraph blogs read like something the journalists have been told to do, and do in a very journalistic fashion, without really understanding the medium within which they find themselves. Not their fault, there's some decent little diary style entries up there, but they could be so much more.

As far as I can tell, it's only really The Guardian that has embraced blogs in the UK - both newspaper blogs and encouraging individual journalist blogs like Completetosh, KickAAS, Bojo among others. By comparison The Telegraph has a wee bit of catching up to do. A bit like my Great aunt's old Morris Minor in second gear up a steep slope with Women's Hour on the radio racing against The Guardian's pimped out V8 hotrod, windows down, fag hanging out the mouth and Suicide's first album playing at volume. OK - Maybe that's not quite the image the Telegraph is going for :) but you get my drift. There's a lot of learning to do. You can't just create a blog and think that's it, job done. It's not. Blogs are a bit different. A bit special.

When I did the podcast you picked up on the other day I had a bunch of journalist blogs open on my laptop - see the photo and hit the links embedded within it - I intended to refer to some of them during the discussion. These blogs, I believe, are excellent examples of different journalists using blogs in highly creative ways. Inspiring stuff.

As you say, you're 'feeling your way forward'. With a few tweaks and a healthy splosh of creativity, I reckon the Tele-blogs will mature nicely. As I said at the beginning, it really depends on what the newspaper wants to gain from having blogs in the first place.

Hugh Fraser at Blog Relations has a few of his own ideas. FWIW, I think the idea of a single group blog as opposed to eight individual blogs is a good one.

Technorati Tags: Telegraph, journalism, blogs

Comments

[hugh]

Loads of great ideas here. Another thought has occured to me. At the moment the Telegraph's blog is written by their top foreign correspondents. They have authority, but probably not on top of all the new web techniques and social linking.

Perhaps the telegraph should open their blog to their younger stringers, who might feed in posts from their own blogs. They would be likey to run with all this creative thinking.

Well done for getting this hare running, and for a great interview on Blog Relations's podcast.

Hugh

[pieman]

I quite like the idea of using established Telegraph journos. It's just how they're using it. They need to find their voice, their non-too-journo voice and establish themselves within the blog realm by engaging with it. As I said, the Telegraph needs to figure out what it wants to achieve from these blogs. I'm not sure they have that nailed yet. I'm corresponding off-blog with the Telegraph about all this. Hopefully they'll drop in here too at some point to air their ideas.

[malbonster]

Have you seen the Telegraph's new blogs at http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk? The Telegraph's bloggers are now linking to masses of external sites. There are also blog rolls and integration with all the social bookmarking sites you can mention. They even use tags. It's a bit of a turnaround! I think they've started to catch up with the Guardian. None of the other broadsheets are even out of the starting gates.

[pieman]

I have seen them. Picked up on them here:

http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/story1814.shtml

Apart from the fuck up with the comments section it is a great improvement. I hope they get up to speed sharpish.

I see from your url that your company worked on the site technology. How have the Telegraph themselves responded? What was the remit they gave you? And what was your feeling when you looked at the old site you were asked to revamp? Did you think it was bollocks like a lot of other people?