The Beast that is Blogging

I've always viewed blogging with equal amounts of trepidation and contempt. Trepidation because it mainly seemed to be a hotbed of malice, spite, bitching and backbiting. Contempt because most of what passes as "news" on blogs is a combination of hearsay, rumours and fairytales.

Yet, it's undeniable that blogging has caught on and irreversibly changed the Internet and the newspaper industry. Publications that at one point turned their noses up at blogging are now desperately trying to get onto the bandwagon, while papers that embraced it are now looking for the next best thing. Most have realised that blogging, coupled with proper journalistic ethics and principles, can be a powerful tool in reaching out to your audience.

One of my main aims when I came to the Post-Dispatch was to explore blogging and online journalism. While it's embarrassing to admit that the New Straits Times is still in the stone age when it comes to our online presence, it does mean that there are a lot of innovations which other papers have successfully implemented which we can cherry-pick from.

And so, these last couple of weeks were notable for the fact that I was stationed at the editorial page desk and churning out at least one editorial blog a day.

The experience has been fun and illuminating, and has raised just as many questions as it has answered.

What have I learnt? Well, mainly, and most importantly perhaps, I've learned to develop a thicker skin. Almost every blog written by the editorial writers, including myself, has been subjected to a barrage of criticism and complaints. This is even in cases where the blog entry is one which is, say, about the necessity of having a helmet law, or the need for stricter control regarding texting in vehicles. What appears to be a matter of safety and common sense for the writer can be a totally different issue for some people and they will vehemently, passionately defend their rights not to wear helmets or to text while driving.

This raises a very interesting question. If much of the blogging receives such a negative response, does that mean the writer is out of touch with the common man? Has he become too highfalutin for his own good? Or does it mean that it's only the crazies and the ones who have something bad to say that respond? Do the ones who agree with the ideas just read the post, nod and move on? For my own sake, I hope it's the latter and not the former. To be out of touch with your audience is to hasten the demise of your career as a journalist, methinks.

However, the blogsphere is amazing because it gives you an interactivity that you've never had before with your audience. Done properly, it can engender great discourse with a great flow of ideas from all sides.

I've experimented with this notion, both in the tone and in the content of my blogs. Unlike the other editorial writers, I am not an expert on any of the subjects debated on in America. As such, the tone of my blogs is that of a person who is seeking answers and asking questions of the audience instead of telling them how a thing is or trying to "educate" them on a certain issue. I've noticed that people seem to respond well to this. Maybe they feel good that their opinions are being sought or that their ideas seem to count to the writer. I don't know. But it is something which I'll seek to delve into more fully when I get back to Malaysia.

Blogs are also useful when you want to gauge what people's sentiments are on a certain matter. For example, I've been curious about the ethical debate surrounding undercover reporting in the US ever since I came here. But, most of the opinions I got were from journalists and pseudo-intellectuals who were dissecting the issue and I wasn't sure how attuned they were to the sentiments of the reading public.

So, I just put the question to the readers and got some pretty candid and revealing answers - which were quite often, totally different from the views of the people who dreamed up this notion of ethics.

Blogging is also as much about new techniques in presentation as it is about new techniques of communication. With blogs, you can include pictures, sounds, links, animations, videos and all manner of multimedia. It's an amazing playground for a journalist as it enables him to exercise his creativity to the fullest. While I haven't had much time to explore a lot about this element of blogging, I have a rudimentary grasp of the basic ideas and fleshing out this skill is on my wish list of things to pick up before I go home.