In my last online journalism lecture we were spoken to by Adam Tinworth, head of blogging at RBI, and the author of One man and his Blog, a man seemingly well qualified to talk to me and my fellow young bloggers, but I found what a lot of what he said went against what I thought I had learned about blogging in the short time I have been writing (and making a pretty ham-fisted attempt at it by all accounts), but I was willing initially to cede to a man who had been doing this a lot longer than me, and an awful lot more successfully I might add.
One of the things I had contention with was his focus on not giving blogs, and especially specialist blogs an opinion, but more to collate pertinent information and links and then distribute it to your readership. I can understand the principle, whereby the author has built up a certain amount of respect for their knowledge on a subject and the readers go to it in order to be informed of things around that topic, and this certainly makes sense for Adam, whose company focuses on B2B information, but for me I just don’t see it.
On my own shoddy blog about Manchester I have tries to simply collate information on where the best places are to go on a weekend such as during the Oxjam takeover, but I felt like writing like this was a little bit cold, detached, and failed to have any of my own imprint on it, which is kind of the whole point. If people wanted to just find out what was going on they could go to somewhere like CityLife (please don’t), but I want my readers to read my blog because I sift through all the listings, find out who is really worth going to see and say why, because I am trying to convey the idea that I know what people would want to see because I go to a lot of events and have built up a certain expertise (oh dear that sounds arrogant). So surely my opinion is central to my blogging?
Maybe I'm just confused
Well, I’m off to this week’s lecture now, hopefully this will clear everything up…………..
4 Comments
November 12, 2009 at 6:17 pm
[...] as much as our most recent guest lecturer, Daniel Meadows. If my last Lecture just left me confused, then this one left me nonplussed. Mr Meadows was an interesting lecturer, and his stories about [...]
November 19, 2009 at 11:57 pm
[...] Brilliant Mr Brayne Jump to Comments After Tinworth, Meadows, and now Rory Cellan Jones, I have been rather disappointed by my recent lecturers, but [...]
November 22, 2009 at 1:26 pm
Surely you can create a mixture, especially as it’s your blog? On mine (albeit on a completely different topic to yours), I sometimes detail my weekend wanderings, sometimes just a couple of pictures of interesting things I’ve found or just really whatever takes my fancy. Isn’t that the point?
November 23, 2009 at 2:46 pm
One of the mistakes you are making here is the difference between blogging as an individual and how employess/media organisations work. What Adam was talking about is a hierachy that works well and is established.
your job across the lecture series is to the ideas before you and see what you can do with them.