How to blog the Seattle Times way
I want to have a regular blog at my paper on my beat within a year. So when the Western Washington SPJ chapter had a training on how to blog, I jumped at the chance.
Sounds silly right? You just write stuff down, tell everyone what you think and post something insubstantial every day right?
No, not at all. Geoff Baker, who writes the Mariners Blog for the Seattle Times, and David Postman, who writes Postman on Politics for the Times, said blogging actually takes up a large part of their day.
Postman, the paper’s chief political reporter, said he almost exclusively writes for the blog and occasionally editors will pull something from the blog and put it in the paper with a header of “Exerpts from the blog.” Blogs are not opinion, at least blogs from newspapers should not be, he said.
“I bring the standards of the paper to the blog, not lower my standard to what is out there,” (I cannot remember which one of them said this, my notes are unclear, but I think either one of them could have said it because they had the same message).
Tuesday, December 11th, 2007