As noted earlier, Prints the Chaff blogger Tom Mangan of the San Jose Mercury News has announced he is retiring from frequent blogging.
"I haven't given up on blogging altogether... just a certain variant of it which obliges a take-over-one's-life timesink. My homepage at tommangan.net will still have occasional postings," Tom explained to me today in an email.
"I thought I wanted to be the Romenesko of newspaper editors but my heart wasn't in it for the long haul. But it was fun till it wasn't, which is always the best time to bail. Plus there are tons of editors blogs out there now so I don't feel like there's this big unmet need."
I conducted an email interview with Tom earlier this month and was waiting for the right moment to post it. In homage to Tom, I can't think of a better time than today to do so. Tom, we will miss your regular rants. Every time I fix a spelling error or cut a comma I will always think of your postings and how they made me laugh and think. Keep in touch.
MP: Are bloggers journalists, editors or....?
MANGAN: Bloggers are just people using the Web to spread their voice to an audience. Some do journalism, but some do poetry and pictures of their housecats. Lots of lines of work have had volunteer and professional components -- firefighters come to mind. Desktop publishing made it possible for anybody to become a journalist, but you had to figure out a lot of cranky, difficult software, so few people exploited the opportunity. Blogging software has made it possible to be a volunteer journalist with far fewer technological hurdles.
You can't say bloggers aren't journalists or editors or anything else. There are too many kinds of blogs to say what they are definitively. The key distinction is that so long as they are volunteers with no financial stake in their blogs, they can quit at any time -- and many of them do. But then again, volunteer firefighters often stay with it for decades and pass it along to their kids, so there's more than money at work here.
MP: How are blogging and participatory journalism changing professional journalism?
MANGAN: Not much is happening beyond a few working reporters checking blogs and discussion areas. It won't be "participatory journalism" until audience give-and-take becomes integral to news coverage, and the audience voice becomes part of the story. We're seeing enough bits and pieces of this to recognize fascinating possibilities, but not enough to say it's "changing professional journalism."
Participatory journalism exists in a few specialized areas -- it's rampant in some segments of media and technology, but there are vast swaths of regions, topics and careers that are essentially unblogged. When blogging crosses those frontiers, we'll have a far better idea of how "participatory journalism" will shape up.
MP: What should PR people keep in mind vis-a-vis these changes?
MANGAN: Blogs offer a new way to find targeted audiences; name your audience and start looking for blogs. If you can't find one, it's a good excuse to start one. The great thing about blogs is that the well-done ones manage to attract a devoted, insightful audience to their topic. Thing is: it has to be updated at least daily; it has to have distinctive voice, and it must have a no-bullshit attitude. So, if you're gonna start one you have to be committed to keeping it up. It's not a trivial commitment; it could last years. So think about that, too, before diving in. I know a lot of PR folks are wondering if they can pitch stories to existing bloggers -- that's sorta the old-fashioned way to do it, and most blogs have such small audiences that it might not be worth the effort. I wonder if you wouldn't be better off just starting a blog on the topic you're covering -- that way you can frame the story you want to tell, and let the audience fill in the gaps.
A good blogger can become the online voice of a product, service or personality. To date this is mostly untried, but when branding and advertising budgets run into the millions, how expensive is it to have somebody blogging full-time on some company's behalf? You'd have to be savvy to the Web audience, treat them as equals, be a bit sassy and so forth, but it seems to me it could be done. The trick is matching talent with client.
MP: In Dan Gillmor's new book it mentions your urging newspapers to start instablogs. Why hasn't the Merc done this yet for a big local biz story like Google's IPO? How far away from seeing this used as a regular practice? Does the Merc have an instablog ready for the next earthquake?
MANGAN: Remember, all my blogging is volunteer; I have nothing to do with the Merc's online operations, which are mostly handled via Knight Ridder Digital. So I can't speak to their ideas about blogging. My guess is that Knight Ridder Digital is reluctant to dive headlong into blogging until the novelty wears off and the profit potential becomes more obvious. But I will say that blogs are so easy to set up that it would not be a large task to set one up the next time a quake hits.
MP: Robert Scoble recently urged journalists and bloggers to help each other. He wrote: "For instance, what will happen during the next major earthquake in San Jose? Will the few hundred journalists who work for the San Jose Mercury News be able to keep up with such a huge story? No. Webloggers, because of our numbers, will be able to cover such an event in a way that traditional journalists would never be able to." How do you see bloggers and journalists working together?
MANGAN: Well, we have a generator so our lights will stay on. It'll be hard for all those bloggers to post when the power grid's down and the batteries on their laptops go dead. Access to professional resources will always divide the pros from the volunteers. But there will be volunteer bloggers for the same reasons there are volunteer firemen. In the firefighting trade the volunteers are a given, but in the news trade they are newcomers on the scene. Over time they'll figure out the best ways to work together and stay out of each other's way.
When big news breaks, blogs will spring up spontaneously. The best thing bloggers can do for reporters and photojournalists is to recognize they are people with jobs, deadlines, press runs and editors -- if want to be helpful, fine, but avoid situations where you'll be tripping over each other (a good guideline might be: if you see a reporter, go somewhere else to get the unreported story).
The best thing journalists can do is validate bloggers' efforts by reading, linking and recommending blogs to their readers. Bloggers don't need this validation, but those who get it will be more apt to stick with it than those who are ignored.
MP: What is the best copyediting advice you can offer to bloggers?
MANGAN: Check your spelling, check your names, check your grammar, check your facts. And write well.
Good writing will draw an audience, but mistake-ridden copy will run them off.
