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).
The whole time I was there I couldn’t help remember my previous reporting job and how I tried to get a political blog there. Editors quickly refused, saying it would compromise my integrity. I admit I didn’t fight very hard for it. I didn’t know how to counter them, but now I do.
One of my editors used to constantly remind me “why should anyone care?” or say “this is just inside baseball.” The fact is, while much of the newspaper audience won’t care about the inside baseball stuff, some people do care. There are die hards for anything out there and they go Online to find their fix. Instead of writing a 50-inch political piece on why the local Republican Party is arguing, for instance, you could write daily updates of what you hear from local officials. Audio clips, pictures of the people that readers would not otherwise see. They want analysis and information, both Postman and Baker said.
Oh and another thing. You can’t just write once in a while. You have to write every day, said Baker. “You have to have a passion,” he said. He said he also breaks everything on the blog first, and writes for the paper later: “The chances of us scooping someone on the story the next day is remote.” Postman added “I can’t remember the last time we said ‘let’s wait.’ ” (Baker later added “unless it’s some investigative scoop that only we can get”)
Baker said he can write up to four blog posts a day when he’s covering a Mariner’s game: once in the morning, once before the game, during the game and after the game. He said he can take up to four hours per day blogging, because that’s what it takes to gain a large audience on a baseball blog.
Also, when Baker introduced himself and said that the newspapers of today will depend on Internet technology and multimedia. He even posited that many newspapers within 10 years will likely ax the printing presses and the ink and go completely online only (something I’ve thought for a long time, although I am not sure about the 10-year mark. I think it will depend on when newspapers figure out a solid revenue stream from advertising).
But what can a small-town reporter do? Postman mentioned that some newspapers, including the Washington Post, have tried models of having unpaid bloggers, or asking reporters to blog in their free time. He was adamantly against it. Baker, on the other hand, said he posted a blog after he got up, because that’s when most people read the blog. He said he did a lot of blogging off the clock. They had a back-and-forth at that point, with Postman saying you shouldn’t cave in, and Baker saying it was necessary. I understand where they are coming from. On the one hand, you have to build an online audience, but on the other hand, journalists get paid little enough as it is. Baker said “You can’t do a blog half-assed.”
Long story short, you have to give up some of your newspaper duties to do a blog properly, which means at the least, a post every weekday.
Other random points that they made:
- “People want information, they don’t want to wait for a story (in the newspaper)” — Postman
- People visit your blog to see and read some of the inside scoop that won’t get into the paper. Use audio (a 4-minute rant of an official, for instance), post pictures (it doesn’t have to be professional quality, just use a point-and-shoot), and post video (sparingly and only when appropriate). The Times hosts video on YouTube.
- Blogs can drive the news of the day. For instance, Baker posted an audio rant by Jose Guillen on his blog which ended up being talked about on the radio shows and the blogs for two days.
- You must enable comments to bring people back to the site. While Baker said there’s a lot of freaks on his blog, Postman seems to have managed to encourage civil discourse (about politics no less!). The community polices itself, he said: “You want it to be a welcoming environment. You want people to feel they can join in on the conversation.”
- They post blogs without any editors looking at it because the information needs to go up quickly. After the fact, editors might have a look. Readers also post corrections to the blogs (and with major errors, Postman
lines out the original textand then writes the correction right into the post). - Most readers of the blog will be familiar with the back story. But in case they are not, you can link to a previous post/story you wrote to give them background.
- You can post silly stuff, like this post by Postman: Working hard on a Friday. This gives the reader a view into a world they otherwise wouldn’t see, even if it is the wacky stuff that’s on his desk (antique car gauges??).
So how do I think I can use this every day? For one thing, if I have a major meeting to go to, I write a blog post before the meeting (preferably in the morning). I can blog from the meeting (just like Baker blogs from games). And after the meeting, I can use some of what I blogged about during the meeting as a basis for my pulp-version story. After the meeting I can post another blog. Much of this, I would think, wouldn’t take too much extra time, especially blogging during the meeting. I am taking notes anyway, and there is quite a bit of dead time during the meetings (say, during an executive session).