noodlepie

Blogging for the BBC

I recently started blogging for the good folks over at BBC Good Food Magazine. This is a regular gig. I'll be blogging there every Friday. I've been chatting and working with the digital and the print side of the magazine on and off for around a year now and the blog just recently 'soft' opened. Please go take a look and tell us what you think. Also, look out for the February print edition of the magazine for more detail on the blog. I'll be covering completely different food topics to those I blog about at The Observer and to a completely different audience.

I now blog professionally in three different places and it does somewhat curtail the time I can spend on this blog. However, I wouldn't be doing any of them if I wasn't totally into what they all do. Just a quick recap, here are all the blogs I currently work on, some are paid, most are not,

• Noodlepie - This one. The one you're looking at. The good stuff is in the right hand column.
• awholelotofcrunch - All the Twiglets, all the time. The world's favourite only Twiglets blog.
• From the Frontline - news from the world of foreign correspondents, war reporters and the media in general. I really enjoy all the blogs I work on, but I am pretty much addicted to doing this one.
• Filthy France - don't tend to tread much in here these days. But France is no cleaner than when I started this blog.
• Word of Mouth - The brilliant food blog from the brilliant Observer Food Monthly magazine.
• BBC Good Food - The shiny new BBC blog from the ace recipe magazine.
• idrawsnails - And chameleons, whales, ghosts, spiders and caterpillars. Every kid should have a pixellated scrapbook.
• Commentisfree - Really don't know if I'll write here again. I hope so.
• Twitter - useless and useful. I recommend.

Recruit the best and link to the rest

In recent weeks we've seen foodblogger Amy recruited to blog for the Condenast owned Epicurious. Freakonomics has migrated lock, stock and blog to the opinion section of the New York Times. Brian Stelter of the TVNewser blog was also recruited by the New York Times. Then, just this week, there are rumours that the Cleveland Plain Dealer is interested in hiring four popular political bloggers. The current trend, if there is one, is about getting experienced bloggers onto newspaper and magazine blogs, but not necessarily into print.

From working with ScooptWords - where we tried to sell blog content to print publications - I quickly realised that most bloggers simply don't give a shit about selling stories and writing for the press. A tiny proportion cared. A yet smaller proportion of those were up to task. But, what's happening now is different. Bloggers are being recruited to blog, not to write for print.

Why are newspapers and magazines recruiting bloggers? What's in it for them? What, in effect, are they buying?

With bucketloadsa lolly being ploughed into digital, most journalists still have little or no experience of blogging. Even fewer have a deep understanding as to why online journalism differs from print. Whereas tonnes of bloggers have that knowledge. It makes sense to recruit experienced bloggers to steer some newspaper blogs. In the long run, it's probably cheaper too and far more likely to succeed than going to all the expense of training a print journalist, who isn't really interested and who may or may not ever be any good at it anyway. Plus, most experienced bloggers have a sizable online contact list and some have developed large communities around their blogs. If the community comes with the blogger... what price do you put on that?

Another question, if newspapers want to nurture star bloggers, and they need them, how do you quantify a "star"?

Number of posts? Number of comments? Degree of engagement with commenters? Inbound links? Outbound links? Journalistic skill? Writing style? Consistency? An always-online lifestyle? All are factors and perhaps some more important than others. But I don't really know exactly what criteria a newspaper would use to gauge the success or otherwise of a particular blogger.

Whenever I'm asked to talk to print publications about starting blogs there's invariably an assumption that the more senior staff and the 'celebrity journalists' will be the ones blogging. To which I always reply,

"Maybe your star blogger isn't the editor or the 'sleb columnist. In fact, the chances are your star blogger almost definitely is not either of those people. The first question you have to ask is, who's interested in writing a blog? Maybe your star blogger is the photocopy boy or the tea girl. Someone who's passionate about sommit and interested in blogging. That's who you start with."

While the idea of 'covering what you do best and linking to the rest' still applies, with more digital dough floating about, it increasingly makes sense to try and recruit the best too - if you can still afford them that is...

How a blog post is different to an article in a magazine

And that's about it really.... I spend an increasing amount of time working with magazine journalists trying to explain this point. This is the diagram I often find myself drawing. If you're scratching your head looking at this - I can help you. If your boss is scratching his head - I can help him. If you're nodding sagely in agreement - you don't need me.

I'm blogging this. I'm blogging that.

I wrote a column (yet another...) about blogging and journalism the other day. It'll run in a week or two. Soon after I finished writing it, I re-bumped into a eight year old quote, via a two year old quote,

The beautiful thing about this new meta-journalism is that it doesn't require a massive distribution channel or extravagant licensing fees. A single user with a Web connection and only the most rudimentary HTML skills can upload his or her overview of the day's news. If the editorial sensibility is sharp enough, this kind of metajournalism could easily find enough of an audience to be commercially sustainable, given the limited overhead required to run such a service.

Wee, large et mammoth. It happened. Which then reminded me of those folk who still have trouble seeing bushes for vegetation, florists for flowers etc. Which then lead me back to the guy originally quoted eight years ago. Funny that.

The journalist's weblog part 2

For the second installment of my wee-series about journalists who blog at journalism.co.uk I talked to Robin Hamman of Cybersoc. Robin works for the BBC. I started reading his blog a year or more ago. We had the chance to meet in London in May when I helped (in a very, very small way) organise his We Media fringe event in Soho. Robin's very clued in to the way 'the media landscape' is evolving and he's well worth reading on a regular basis if that subject at all grabs you. As he works for one of the world's biggest and most uniquely funded media outfits, he also has the inside line on big media's take on us new media minnows.

Thanks to everyone who has so far suggested the names and blogs of blogging journalists. I read all your suggestions. However, I'm still on the look out for more, especially the offbeat and the less well known out there. Maybe a guy in China reporting from his blog. Those doing something really unique with their blog. Are there any journalists out there who are solely reporting via blog now? I don't mean the so called 'A' listers here. I'm looking for the newest, freshest, hottest and hippest... well, at least, goodest :)

The journalist's weblog part 1

Thanks to all who dropped comments and sent me emails pointing me in the direction of journalists who blog. I'll be checking them all out in due course. The first installment, in a series of six, about blogging journalists is now up at journalism.co.uk. It's about Sandeep Junnarkar and his excellent Lives in Focus blog. Always on the look out for more...

Where are the journalists who blog?

I haven't been opening up much about work of late on noodlepie, that changes this week... I'm working on a mini-series for a UK publication about journalists who write blogs. Why do they blog? Is blogging changing the way they work? Isn't this whole blog thing all just a storm in a horses mouth? Does anyone really care about blogs apart from bloggers? I'm looking to talk to journalists who blog to try and find out why on earth they bother. If you know a good journalist/blogger, especially if you read one that you like, please post a comment, email or IM me. I'm doing the first one on Sandeep at Lives in Focus. One of the best out there I reckon.

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