Clearing the Blog Fog
East Tennessee Society of Professional Journalists panel discussion on blogging
Nov. 21, 2006

Host: Ed Hooper, president of the ETSPJ

Moderator: Dorothy Bowles, professor at the UT School of Journalism and Electronic Media and past ETSPJ president

Panel:

Betty Bean journalist/blogger

Jack McElroy, Editor, Knoxville News Sentinel

Glenn Reynolds, UT law professor and InstaPundit

Bob Stepno, UT Journalism and Electronic Media lecturer and blogger,

Johnny Dobbins, Rocky Top Brigade proprietor and blogger

R. Neal, blogger and KnoxViews proprietor.

[Editor's Note: Text in parentheses is paraphrased or based on recollection of what was said because the speaker can't be heard clearly on the recording. Empty parentheses indicates unintelligible gaps in the recording. Please let us know if anyone have any additions, corrections, or clarifications.]

Dorothy Bowles: Pew Research survey found that only 11% of bloggers are considered "serious" bloggers focusing on public affairs and politics, v. others that are more personal diary type bloggers.

["Ted Hitler" clip from the Daily Show]

Dorothy Bowles: There seems to be some confusion about both mainstream media and blogging. Mainstream media gets confused with "least credible among them" such as tabloids and entertainment media, bloggers are confused with 35 year olds living in their parent's basements blogging in their pajamas. That's not our panel, these are serious bloggers.

Glenn said that 9/11 and the way media covered it gave birth to blogs.

Glenn Reynolds: 9/11 gave blogs a big shot in the arm. There were blogs before 9/11 but there was dissatisfaction with coverage of the attacks, showing the planes hitting the towers over and over for days, leaving people wondering what happened and why. People turned to alternative forms of media.

Dorothy Bowles: Has frustration with the media fueled the growth of blogs?

Betty Bean: Perhaps, but it's also the availability of technology and people think it's fun.

R. Neal: I was a little frustrated that I'd write letters to the editor but they'd never get printed, so I started publishing them myself and hoped someone might read them. Michael Silence asked me to explain blogging one time and I said it's letters to the editor without the letters or the editor. Betty is also right, that more people are spending more time on the internet, and they're looking for fresh content, new information, different perspective, inside info (Betty: It's like crack!) and blogs provide that.

Bob Stepno: Except for the crack part, that's right. It's fun to do, like putting on a show in the barn. Also frustrated journalists, such as two friends from the Hartford Courant who started an alternative paper, frustrated journalists can start an alternative media in an afternoon with a free piece of software. It's people with something to say and a place to say it. The first two podcasters were out of work professional broadcasters, Christopher Lydon and Adam Curry. Audio blogging led them back into broadcasting. The self expression thing and news reporting thing come together.

Johnny Dobbins: Around the same time blogs started taking off there was the dot com bust, techies had to have somewhere to vent their frustration.

Jack McElroy: Regarding reference to 9/11, my appointment as editor of the KNS was announced on 9/11, of course that news was pushed off the front page. I came into the job just as blogs were taking off, and always wondered what it would be like to be an editor before blogging. That must have been the golden age, when you could get away with anything and nobody would call you on it. Now you get continuous feedback. I read Romenesko, a blog about the industry and is read by my peers. And at any given time Randy can catch me on something and everybody I care about can read about how I screwed up. Blogging has changed the business, not so much for me because there have been blogs since I've been an editor, but it has had an effect on a lot of things as far as credibility is concerned.

Dorothy Bowles (to Jack McElroy): You said in your column on your five year anniversary that "Sometimes I fear that the criticism feeds on itself," talking about bloggers, and "in the anonymous world of the web, an electronic mob mentality sets in, bashing becomes a pastime. But at the same time the feedback helps those of us who write and edit the News Sentinel learn to do a better job." That's a good cooperative attitude to have, and is that one of the reasons you have blogs at the newspaper, aimed at transparency of how things get done?

Jack McElroy: That's the purpose of my blog, it's what would be called in the business a "transparency blog" to explain a little more about what's going on in our business, several of our other blogs are experiments in delivering information through new channels, and involving people in development of our content.

Dorothy Bowles (to Jack McElroy): Do you feel that blogs drive readers to your print edition?

Jack McElroy: I'm not sure. I think people who are actively engaged in public affairs online tend to be media consumers of a wide range and that they probably do read the newspaper a lot, so I think it helps our position in the community and it helps our contact with readers whether they are online or print. We are more and more viewing ourselves as not being too concerned about how people connect with us as long as there is a connection.

Dorothy Bowles: Research shows serious bloggers are among the best read people, much more so than the typical population, and particularly in keeping up with public affairs.

Glenn Reynolds: One thing bloggers hear from journalists is "why do you hate us so much", and of course it's not true, it's like the people in the baseball stadium yelling "you bums" at the players, but they bought the ticket and they're there. They're there because they like baseball. If they're complaining it's because they care. If they don't care about baseball, they're not in the stadium at all. They're off blogging about Gilmore Girls or something. And there's probably a whole subculture who bitch about how Gilmore Girls has gone downhill.

Q: Randy, I know that you had blogged under cover of anonymity for quite some time, what lead you to that decision to not release your name?

R. Neal: Well, I didn't want my Mom reading it. There was some pretty salty language on there sometimes. But my business operates in a pretty conservative industry that probably wouldn't appreciate my viewpoints. But it really started out as sort of a joke. I really wasn't even a blog at first, it was just a website with some stories and pictures and links about South Knoxville. It really started at the Metropulse website (Metroblab), this South Knox Bubba character was sort of invented over there, and then the Great Rodeo Troll April Fools joke that Betty wrote about...

Betty Bean: He's being quite modest. I first noticed him and appreciated the humor... he did an April Fools day spoof on K2K, which was a sort of a forerunner of a blog that we have evolved beyond now, that really ticked the K2K folks off because they bit. It was pretty ridiculous, because Knoxville was going to become the rodeo capital of the world, and he went into great detail about the venue, it was going to be over behind the Hyatt, people started throwing up their hands and screaming about light pollution and cruelty to animals, and when people found out they'd been snookered they were pretty upset, and that's how I made the acquaintance of South Knox Bubba.

R. Neal: So that was really a joke, but then there were a lot of things going on with politics and I had opinions and I had a website, so there you go. I stuck with the name, this character I'd invented, although a lot of people knew who I was.

Q: Is it easier for bloggers to blog under conditions of anonymity?

R. Neal: I guess it depends. I have found it is easier to not (blog anonymously) and to have a legitimate sounding name like KnoxViews. If you call up a public official and say you're South Knox Bubba..., but when tell them your real name and say something like KnoxViews they're a little more serious about talking to you. But I guess it depends on what you're blogging about and whether you're putting out a lot of lies and slander, then I guess you probably want to remain anonymous. There are people who do that unfortunately and it gives bloggers a bad name, but they usually get run out of business pretty quick.

Q: Let's talk about standards. You try to impose on your site certain standards, for example if you're just going to engage in ad hominem name calling eventually you're going to bounce them. I don't know that most sites do that much policing and control as you do, to make sure that people actually make an informed argument, don't repeat rumors without substantiation, don't engage in personal attacks, I think those are some of your rules. Or do a lot of bloggers impose certain restrictions, and do most allow posting by others?

R. Neal: There are two different parts to that. There are the blog postings that show up on the front page like an article. Not many blogs have multiple... like in our case anybody can log in with a user ID and an email address and setup an account and start posting articles to the front page. So in that environment, we have to have some rules or it would get totally out of hand, as it did in the past few days. Around election time it gets a lot worse. (Betty: and probably right now!) Yeah, probably right now because they know I'm here and not watching... But, that's one difference. Some of the big blogs that have huge traffic, they just can't monitor the comments, that's the other part of it, the comments people make on articles, and anybody on most sites can logon and without even registering or giving an email and say whatever they want. At a big site like Atrios it's impossible for them to read those so they don't even try unless something's brought to their attention.

Q: Do you follow a similar policy?

Glenn Reynolds: My site doesn't have comments. My feeling is... I've been blogging so long that when I started nobody had comments, and I just never added them, because I felt that if anything went on my site it was going to be associated with me, fairly or unfairly, and I didn't really want to have responsibility for policing the stuff. Because when you start policing stuff not only do you put a lot of time into it but also anything you let through you are responsible for. It probably doubles your site traffic to have comments, because it becomes like a chat room (R. Neal: we like to think of it as "community") but I've just never done it and I have to say there are times when I've regretted it, I'm technologically capable of having comments and I will occasionally open comments on a topic, but I very seldom regret not having them. There's a level up to which comments tend to be good and interesting with respectful conversation, but when you exceed a certain level it tends to become the equivalent of the old Usenet flame wars. After about fourteen or fifteen comments it has nothing to do with the original subject of the post

Helen Smith (Mrs. Instapundit): I just want to add, on my blog we have open comments. I'm a psychologists and I believe people should come on and comment. Unfortunately if they know I'm Glenn's wife they come on to tell me about him, which I ignore, but after seeing the comments they write about Glenn I say thank God Glenn doesn't have comments because some of them are so offensive. The level of commenting, it can be troublesome, what do people do when they get such negative comments? People call me every sort of name, and (to Betty) do you find as a woman you get different types of comments?

Betty Bean: Oh, sure. Yes.

Johnny Dobbins: Comments are a double-edged sword. In the case of KnoxViews the community is self-policing. If someone comes up and says something that's partially correct or incorrect there's going to be someone shortly after that correcting them or pushing them in the right direction or saying this person's a moonbat (Betty Bean: or a wingnut) and then "boom". So there is a certain level of self-policing.

Dorothy Bowls: One of the favorable things about blogs is that they are self-correcting, almost instantaneously. If the bloggers' not correcting him or herself someone else is.

Q: I need some historical help, because I wasn't reading blogs back in 2001. When you mentioned they turned to blogs, because they were providing something that television coverage, newspaper coverage, wasn't providing. I know of conspiracy theories, but I really don't know what they provided that was so valuable.

Glenn Reynolds: (Talked about people blogging live reports from the scene, Jeff Jarvis, Megan McCardle blogging from the recovery site after the attacks. The media quoting people as saying now we will have to give up all our freedoms and there was pushback against that on the blogs and people appreciated that. The institutional media was distancing themselves from it while at the same time making it extra personal and extra scary, and the first-person approach of blogs was sort of comforting for people.)

Q: I read that despite the explosion of news sources, many of these sources are coving the same major stories. Do you expect the same thing with blogging, where bloggers are all writing about the same big news stories? Do you think there is more diversity of stories in blogging than in the traditional media?

R. Neal: There are different types of blogs. KnoxViews, for example, is trying to be more of a local and state oriented blog, but on the national blogs, if there's a big story certainly everybody talks about it, and there are hundreds or thousands of blogs linking to the New York times or Washington Post version of the story. There's a good website called memeorandum.com that collects those links, so they'll have the story, and they'll have all the blogs that are linking to it and talking about it. One thing that hasn't been said is that blogs are certainly dependent on the mainstream media to actually do the feet on the street reporting, the original reporting of the stories, and bloggers sort of add context to that story from their own opinions, their personal perspective, or as Glenn was saying eyewitness accounts. So certainly if there's a big story that's what everybody's going to be blogging about and talking about. But there are other blogs like ours and others in the state, and you can check the Rocky Top Brigade to see some of these, that talk about their county commission meetings or whatever, they talk about things that were said but maybe didn't get in the paper.

Q: Do you see blogs writing about significant events that aren't being covered in the mainstream media?

Glenn Reynolds: You're seeing more individual blog coverage and real reporting. There are a bunch of bloggers who have been to Iraq, either embedded or gone out on their own and reported back, and you get a lot more first hand reporting not just from big media. And I think local blogs are where (the real bet is), because not everybody can go to Iraq but anybody can go to a city council meeting.

Betty Bean: I can tell you there were several times when I walked into a meeting that I'm covering, and I walk in and I see Randy and Michele, and I think, oh, crap. Because I know that they're going to have the story within an hour.

Q: Looking at it from an investment point of view, should I invest my time in reading a blog that is commenting on an article when I just go straight to that article.

Johnny Dobbins: A lot of times you have bloggers leading the way for the national media. For example, Glenn Reynolds and the Porkbusters, or the Truth Laid Bear. (Remarks about stories that start on blogs and gain momentum and then get picked up by the media.)

Q: Along those lines, when does blogging become journalism? And vice versa? Or does it? Do those two ever intersect?

Bob Stepno: If someone is writing their own blog, and reporting facts, I'd call that journalism. If someone is writing their own blog and writing essays about things, I'd call that essay-ism. If they're just commenting on politics from the sidelines, I'd call that punditry. This is the most flexible media you can imagine. I have a friend in Massachusetts who got annoyed at her local newspaper. She lives in a small town outside of Boston, Watertown, and she heard an explosion one night. She turns on the local radio, nothing about it. She looks in the local newspaper, a bi-weekly, nothing in there for the next two issues. She's a blogger, so she grabs some better software, the same program in fact that KnoxViews uses, it's called Drupal, and sets up a community site she calls H2OTown.info. And she has a community of people there (to do what the local paper can't). The Boston Globe isn't putting a crew of reporters in Watertown. The local bi-weekly is owned by a conglomerate who owns a hundred local newspapers scattered around Eastern Massachusetts and is owned by the Boston Herald. And they don't have full staffs of people in each town who know what that town's doing. So there's room for people to do sort of real journalism, without getting paid for it. Maybe if they can figure out a way to get paid for it... (Bob talks about a former alt-weekly reporter in Hartford who started a sponsor funded blog and now does it for a living, and says he is doing serious work, he was a reporter for 25 years before that.) So there is journalism happening out there, and some stuff that isn't. And in fact there is a site called "colbertkilledapanda.com" (in reference to the video clip that opened the discussion) that was setup the day that was broadcast. ... It's a box of chocolates for sure.

Q: One thing to get clear is that bloggers have broken serious news stories over the past year. Directing this at Jack does that change the way an editor functions, do you have to keep an eye on the blogs now, do you see stories come across the blogs that you wish had come across the news desk?

Jack McElroy: News comes at us in a lot of different ways. I like to think of it as we are all swimming through a sea of media and throughout the day people receive messages and at the end of the day they're not even exactly sure where you got it all from. But, are we methodically perusing blogs? We are doing some of that, and monitoring some, but that's an almost infinite universe to explore. I do think blogs are great (for business). Didn't Drudge actually shake loose the Lewinsky story?

Q: Wasn't the Foley story part blog, too?

Glenn Reynolds: That was a black blog op. That was a blog setup solely to spin the Foley story. There weren't many entries before the Foley story. As Mickey Kaus put it, the sixth, seventh, and eight entries brought down the Republican Congress.

Q: But in the last election cycle we saw some of the networks had reporters there who kept their eyes on the blogs, so is this becoming a practice? It wasn't too long ago you guys were the bane of journalism's existence, and now you've become what you hate most?

Glenn Reynolds: I think the "hate most" part is a bit of an exaggeration. (A professional wrestling analogy re. adversarial relationships.) I think most blogs are happy that professional journalists pick up on their stories. Journalists email me links to their stories all the time so they can get it out there, so it works both ways.

Bob Stepno: Everybody in the room knows there are fewer newspapers now, () and newspapers have fewer reporters in state houses around the country and city halls around the country. So there's certainly room to fill in a lot of blanks.

Q: Do you think blogging is self-correcting the journalism industry in a way?

Jack McElroy: We operate in a fishbowl now. The Dan Rather story is the poster child of that. The errors are being exposed, and it's been very positive in that regard. The general public perception of established or mainstream journalism has maybe never been lower. The polls show mistrust and credibility issues, and I think it's ironic that there were probably a lot of problems before that nobody ever knew about, so now that you're better and your problems are being aired your credibility goes down. I've got to believe that it's a good thing in the long run for the basic mission of journalism speaking truth. And if you think about freedom of the press in the broadest sense, as contributing to the democratic marketplace of ideas, then the more the merrier and the quicker we get to the truth.

Q: Your statement makes me think that as information gets disseminated... that's the thing that bothers me about the press. The Rather thing, or the Foley thing, or today the Michael Richards thing, it gets said over and over and over and what does it... we're vilifying people by doing this. And do we know whether all this stuff is true? Who do we trust? Bob said there are fewer newspapers, but I get more newspapers now than I ever have, and so it's more information and we're trying to figure out who to trust. You say it's better because it's more, but it's not always better because it's more. And that's a concern to me, and maybe it's self-correcting, but when will it correct?

Jack McElroy: Maybe when there was a limited number of media, you could view each evening newscast or morning newspaper as the truth. Of course, I'm not sure that was, and I think it's a dynamic flow that we never actually reach the absolute truth because we continue to have the scope revealed to us. So I don't know when you reach it and stop and say we've found it out.

Q: Do you think the move from reporter initiated news to source initiated news created that malaise that gave birth to bloggers? We see more broadcast and newspapers using source initiated news, press releases, and you don't have that much reporter initiated news and as many reporters out there kicking over stories. We see that on blogs, but we don't see as much of it in newspapers as we used to.

Jack McElroy: I'm not sure I agree with that. I guess that the level of manipulation of the media by the public relations art is probably greater than it ever was. But then you have the "black blog ops" and there's a manipulation tool that was born of the new technology. So maybe we're more manipulated or more controlled by source driven but I'm not sure that's true. I think we still have some enterprising journalists ().

Johnny Dobbins: (remarks about investigative reporting and professional journalists and large media outlets who have more resources and backing v. bloggers who are out there on their own.)

Q: To what extent does it matter that you have a big corporate entity behind you? How do you overcome that, how do you work on a story without the corporate media backing to give you some protection?

Johnny Dobbins: (remarks that the corporate backing may be overbearing, people might be more likely to talk to someone who doesn't have corporate lawyers standing behind them.)

Betty Bean: That's a good question. As an individual, you have more filters (). But it (working for established media) does give you more clout. Back when Knoxville had two daily papers and I worked for one of them, people took more notice (Glenn Reynolds: isn't it good enough when they hear your name?).

R. Neal: People take real reporters more seriously than they do bloggers, there's no doubt about that. But, I've seen over the past couple of years as more people know about blogs and what they are and know what might be said if they don't talk to them (bloggers) that people are more open to talking to bloggers, particularly serious bloggers.

Glenn Reynolds: On the Porkbusters project, a blogger attempted to get a statement from their Representative in Congress regarding a pork project in their district, called several times and never head back, finally left a message saying I just want to let you know I have a blog and I'm going be writing about what I hear from you, and then they called back. So maybe it wasn't the New York Times calling the first time, but the blog was enough to kick-start them in some way to thinking they had better respond.

Betty Bean: Almost all of our local elected officials monitor blogs, the ones that are online anyway, and the media does, too. You frequently see someone from Channel 6 or Channel 10 or the News Sentinel commenting to correct something, or confirm something.

Johnny Dobbins: We certainly see the media is reading local bloggers. Running the Rocky Top Brigade, looking through the logs, and seeing who is reading and what blog articles they are clicking on, I can tell you that every news outlet in Knoxville is reading local blogs.

Q: Whether they like to admit it or not?

Johnny Dobbins: They are and they are doing it a lot. (Audience member: Because we like to know our enemy!)

Q: Would each of you comment on how many hours a day you invest in your blog, and what do you see for the future of your blog? Are you going to do anything different in the future, do you intend to carry it a long time into the future, and, sorry to ask this, do you earn any money from your blog?

R. Neal: I probably spend too much time on the blog...

Q: How much is too much?

R. Neal: I'm not going to say. But I'm fortunate, because a lot of people don't have the opportunity to have the time to spend. To me it's like a hobby, so I don't begrudge (the time spent). Most people with a normal day job could not spend the kind of time I spend, but it's fun so I do it. As far as making money, we just started offering advertising, and we have a few dollars trickling in, enough to pay the hosting bills, but certainly not enough to pay my salary. As for the future, I don't know. We wanted to have an open, community space for alternative discussion and discussion of things that are happening in the community, and also citizen journalism. There hasn't been as much of that (citizen journalism) at our blog as I'd like to see, but I'd like to see it evolve more into that and more original reporting. And obviously everybody wants to grow their readership and their page views. As far as ever making a living from it, or entertaining the idea that someone might want to buy it as a media property or something, I don't foresee that. It's a hobby to me, but I think other bloggers certainly go in to it with that idea, that it could be a possibility.

Glenn Reynolds: My blog started accidentally. () I remember, and this was when blogs were only about a year old, and I was up in New York and having lunch with a friend of mine and some Conde Nast executives, that's what he was, and they asked me about my business plan, my business model and all that stuff. And I told them I didn't have one, and they literally thought I was lying. They were sure I was holding out on them. But that's how they think, not how I think. (Regarding time spent) With my blog, it's sort of interleaved through the day. I tend to do it in five or ten minute increments, throughout the day. I'd have to get a stop watch, but I probably wouldn't want to know the answer anyway. Other kinds of writing I do tends to be in big blocks of time, like working on a law article or a magazine article you need a couple of hours without being bothered. Blogging isn't like that. You're working on something else like a book or a magazine article, and you come to a stopping point and you go get a cup of coffee and you switch screens, Word Perfect goes away, Explorer comes up, you look at your email, you put up a post, and go back to what you were doing. So it's hard to tell how much it takes out of the day. It's probably more than I realize because it's done in fairly small increments.

Q: (about profit?)

Glenn Reynolds: There's some website that purports to value blogs. The formula has to do with AOL's acquisition of Jason Calacanis Weblogs, Inc. empire. I'm not sure how it works but I think it counts your page views via Sitemeter and has a fairly simplistic formula, and it said my blog is worth $35 million. Which I think is more of an indication of how AOL got taken to the cleaners, but I will say that if anyone offered me $35 million I will hand over the keys that day. Google apparently can afford it, because I saw today that they reached a market value of $159 billion. As long as they're paying too much for things, I'm available. But I assume markets are more rational than that.

R. Neal: But what would a blog be worth without the personality behind it? Wonkette is the perfect example.

Glenn Reynolds: Yeah, you lose Anna Marie Cox (). I don't think my blog would be worth much of anything without me. It would be a domain squatting site for (porn and fireworks and stuff like that).

Bob Stepno: () I look at your site, and there's something new every time I look at it. I'm lucky if I write something for mine three times a week. () So I might have something that's five paragraphs long with seven links in it, and do that twice a week, rather than write two sentences and include a link. In a way, a lot of what I'm writing is simply stuff I realized I wanted to say in that lecture this morning, but I didn't get around to. () So mine is more of a serial bunch of web pages than it is a blog or a conversational kind of thing.

Johnny Dobbins: The Rocky Top Brigade has archives of all of them.

Q: How many Rocky Top Brigade members are there now?

Johnny Dobbins: (Discussion of Rocky Top Brigade members and how active East Tennessee is for bloggers. [Ed. note: cannot hear the stats. Johnny?]) As far as how often I post, I just posted something (using PDA device). So it's just as often as you check your e-mail at school, people are on the internet posting to blogs. When I'm reading my email I might see a blog post and might post something about it. For me it's not so much that I sit down for an hour or twice a week and think about blog posts. I'm just going through my day, reading and consuming the blogs and oh, there's something interesting, I think I'll comment on it. Making money? Bless you if you can do it. ()

Dorothy Bowles: On making money, in the buyout of the Dallas Morning News recently, I know several of the reporters there, they tended to be more columnists or had some special expertise, they took the buyout and started a blog and got the Google ads and they're hoping to actually make a living. One's a friend of mine, and he's still got a child to put through college. He say's he's hoping. The buyout will go quite a ways, but probably not pay college tuition.

Q: You said your bread and butter is politics. That seems what most blogs are noted for, their political coverage.

Glenn Reynolds: I think that's what journalists read. As that survey said, there are loads of blogs that are not very political. My blog is a lot more political than I thought it would be when I started it, and that's because we live in more political times than we were living in. I was looking back at my September 10th posts which including such things as who had the best (ass? act?) in the () Music awards. I think journalists read political blogs, which means they write about political blogs, giving the impression that most blogs are political. But there are a lot of Gilmore Girls blogs.

Q: To what extent are blogs self-corrective? What happens when you as bloggers find out you made a mistake?

R. Neal: It depends on how long your post has been up there. If it's only been up for couple of minutes you might edit it to make the mistake go away. If it's been up there all day, you're probably going to have to put a strike-thru and an update saying "I was wrong," and that's really all you can do and still have any credibility.

Glenn Reynolds: My rule is if the post is pretty close to the top and it's a minor error, (I just fix it). There's this pretentious thing that some bloggers do if they fix a comma splice they'll put a note about it, and that seems a little full of yourself. But I'll fix it if it is quick, if it's longer I'll fix it in the post, and if it scrolls and if it matters, if it touches on some person's reputation or something, I'll fix it in the post and I'll also put a note at the top of the page and it'll link back so people won't miss it. I think that's pretty standard for most blogs. Readers are generally, if you make a mistake, your readers are all over you, and in fact readers are all over you even when you don't make a mistake. ()

Q: Going back to the point Randy was making about more original content. Are we in journalism education missing an opportunity here to offer workshops where we can say OK, here's how to do computer assisted reporting. Here are our favorite techniques for interviewing. Are we missing an opportunity to train people who are in effect journalism hobbyists to train journalists as bloggers who want to...

R. Neal: Yeah, definitely. I talked to Bob about that one time about putting together a class project to write such a guide for citizen journalists. So absolutely I think that you would have a lot of interest in that. I think. At least there's one person interested in that.

Bob Stepno: We actually seek what people really want to know about. Every once in a while I put up something like a link to the EFF guide, the people's guide for bloggers, that has (advice for keeping yourself out of trouble). (There is a website by Poynter called News U) that offers short courses on (things like) a couple of hours on how to write better headlines. I see not only blog posts but e-mails where the headline or the subject line doesn't tell you what's in it and I just want to grab these people and say verb! You need a verb! But I don't know how many bloggers want to listen to that. () (I had written about News U on my blog) and they later contacted me and asked me to send the e-mail addresses of my students, and I wrote back and said hell no. I'll put stuff about you on my blog, they're a non-profit, but I don't think that's within the... there are some folks who did that around the country and I wanted to throw an ethics blogging task force open. But there are resources out there.

R. Neal: As far as what kinds of things I think bloggers could use some help with, ethics is certainly one of the things, and standards of journalism. I don't think most of them want to be lectured to so much about writing (some of them probably need it). But things like how to work public records, what's available at the courthouse, who do you ask for what, what's there, what can you get to. A lot of people don't know that you can just go down and ask for property tax records and that sort of thing. (Betty Bean: Libel laws!) Yeah, where do you get libel insurance?

Q: Do you worry about these fake blogs, or "flogs" they call them, that somehow that will discredit your work? I'm thinking about the Wal-Mart blog that turned out to be a PR creation.

Johnny Dobbins: You have that in the media, too. It's not just blogs. You have bona fide media organizations that get (news and press releases) from fake organizations.

Glenn Reynolds: Or video news releases. They run on local stations all the time.

Jack McElroy: Letters to the editor is an area that () we try to do searching on certain terms to see if it's actually a locally produced letter or if it's astroturf () to help us fight it.

Johnny Dobbins: I got an e-mail back (from the KNS) one time asking if I was a real person () saying we've gotten a lot of e-mails from KnoxViews, are you real?

R. Neal: We actually did run an astroturf campaign once, about registration at the Knoxville News Sentinel website. It wasn't supposed to be that, it was supposed to be an "express your point of view" thing but the software unfortunately didn't let you put in your own point of view so they go the same letter over and over and over. So we got rid of that.

Jack McElroy: One thing I'm intrigued about is, in the instance of like Porkbusters, the idea of open source investigative reporting. I keep thinking maybe we should start some kind of experiment where () in our organization we say hey, everybody out there, we're going to investigate X, have at it, and see where it goes. It makes me nervous to think about, on the other hand I also think that could be pretty powerful.

Dorothy Bowles: Are you familiar with PressThink, where they're doing that, at Jay Rosen's... (Bob Stepno: NYU).

Jack McElroy: I've heard of that but I don't know what they do.

Dorothy Bowles: There will be citizen journalism and they've been advertising for a couple of editors, and I'm thinking wow, it's going to take a special breed of editors to edit this copy, but essentially they are inviting anybody who wants to participate to help report these stories. Now they haven't come up with a list of stories yet, but they're soliciting citizen journalists and they've gotten one... I think the Sunshine Foundation gave them a little money, and the guy that runs... oh, I think Mark Cuban gave them some money. So they've got like fifty thousand dollars, not a huge amount of money, but they'll have like two paid employees and the rest will all be citizen journalists. I think it's a great idea if they come up with some good projects.

Q: Do you have a definition of what makes a successful blog? Also, with all the blogs out there, how do you decide what sites you like to go to? In Oak Ridge there are a couple of blogs I check regularly, but across the nation, how do you decide? Experimentation, word of mouth or recommendations?

R. Neal: Blogrolls. The list of blogs (in the sidebar of blogs). That's a good place to start at least. Glenn will have a set of blogs that are more ideologically aligned with his point of view maybe, although his are pretty balanced, but you can go there and if you like that blog, odds are that the ones they have listed are of like mind that you might also be interested in. And another good way is the aggregators, like the Rocky Top Brigade, but I'm not sure there's anything like that on a national level.

Glenn Reynolds: No, but Memeorandum and Technorati kind of do that. And one of the things that is a really useful research tool is to take the URL of a news article that interests you and plug it in to Technorati and then (you will get) a list of all the blogs that link to that article, and that leads you to a lot of interesting blogs. I've got a lot of readers, and I get something over a thousand emails a day with tips and stuff, and that's sort of like group blogging. Some people have said my blog is really a group blog with a strong editor. A lot of times what I do is more like editing. (Following leads on stories) maybe saying I'm not sure that's true, let me go poke around and see if it's true, or let it percolate a while and see what people find out.

Q: Have you thought about what makes a successful blog?

Glenn Reynolds: I think it's the personal voice that's a lot of it. () I write for Popular Mechanics, and I was talking to some of their people and pressing to get a lot more content on the web and more blogging, and they've kind of done that. And one thing they tell me is that they press their reporters to blog on the site while they're working on a story, and what they find is that then when they get back from their trips to wherever they've gone, they often times () say (the blog) is fresher and more immediate than the stuff you sit down and write when you get back () and you're going over your notes. So they've found that, they think the blogging has made the writing better. For me, frequent updates (make a blog successful). If I slack off because I'm busy or I'm tired, and don't update as regularly for a few days my traffic starts to fall off. People like the idea that they will find something fresh and new whenever they visit the site.

Bob Stepno: I post to mine so infrequently I'm lucky that I have other motivation, that students can go to my blog and once in a while see something that's relevant to their next test. There are so many I want to read. I did an article for PC World magazine two summers ago about RSS aggregators, programs that grab headlines and summaries. One of them is (?), an aggregator website, so you can subscribe to things there. It will give you a little prompt saying how many messages there are in the blogs you have subscribed to that you haven't read yet. Since I was testing thirty different aggregator programs, I had one long list of subscriptions that I plugged in to all of them. And this thing pops up on my screen one day and said you have a hundred and twenty thousand messages waiting. And that's about where I still feel I am. That was in the summer of 2004, I think I've gotten about as far as August 2004 now reading them. There are half a dozen I'd like to be reading every day and I'm happy if I get to them twice a month. So there are a few that I look at more often than others. I don't read Glenn's as often as I'd like to, I read more that are in the journalism profession to see what's going on there. I read Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen, Romenesko, folks like that. And a few computer geeks who build the software, a guy named Dave Winer who wrote the program I do my blog with, and just happened to get a fellowship at Harvard for a year, where he hung out building blog engines at Harvard Law School. I went over there to sit in one of the meetings, he said oh yeah, you can come around, you don't have to go to Harvard. And I sat in the meeting complaining about his software. He said, oh no, I don't want to talk about that. We’re using a different program here at Harvard, so here, have a blog on Harvard's server, too. Reading his stuff, reading all the people who are blogging at Harvard, and who are connected to that community, you find that one leads to another. From Winer, who's a multi-millionaire software geek, he's running around the country living in Florida for a while, California for a while, I started reading his blog one day and found this guy named Rex who had interesting stuff to say, and it turns out he's a magazine publisher in Nashville. So it's an interesting community, and several, or thousands of different communities connecting to each other like filo dough or something. Maybe I'll catch up by about two thousand three hundred.

Johnny Dobbins: I tend to, when I actually start reading, when I go online the first place I go is the Rocky Top Brigade to see what's the latest and greatest. I'm not so much interested in a lot of the national blogs, because I'm a local kind of guy and I like to read what's happening in East Tennessee (and Middle Tennessee) so I start there, and I see a lot of Instapundit scrolling through the Rocky Top Brigade, but you tend to find things that are outside the normal news cycle (), interesting stories about people's lives that you wouldn't normally see, (such as) this fellow in Oak Ridge who just lost his wife or (). It's a refreshing look at totally different points of view on so many different topics. And doing it locally () you get to learn more about the region and the people.

Betty Bean: The Oak Ridge guy, that was one of the most read local blogs (), and that was some of the most compelling stuff I've ever read.

Dorothy Bowles: And it's attracted readers from all over the nation, and maybe outside the nation, and comments from Alaska and all kinds of places.

(Conclusion, thanks to panel and attendees.)