18 Months of Blogs (Part 2)
Part Two: Editorial Dilemmas and the Future
Earlier this week, I posted a brief history of the 91Èȱ¬ Blogs Network and provided some insight into the technical dilemmas we've faced since launch 18 months ago. Today's post looks at the editorial challenges.
I don't believe that every 91Èȱ¬ television or radio programme or personality should have a blog, nor do I know of anyone within the 91Èȱ¬ who would want this, yet hardly a week goes by without at least one request for a new blog.
There's a process for the proposal of new blogs which, currently, doesn't capture whether or not our would be bloggers have what the Guardian's Emily Bell calls . Without an author who has a "drive to blog", a blog that looks great on paper ends up lacking in substance and appears soulless.
Many people don't have an inner blogger and not every 91Èȱ¬ presenter, reporter, producer or editor wants to blog. Indeed, there are some who think the 91Èȱ¬ shouldn't be blogging at all. For example, earlier this year, the 91Èȱ¬'s Senior News Correspondent said :
"... journalists shouldn't have any time to blog - there are too many stories waiting to be told!"
Adie has a point - blogging does take time - but I disagree that it necessarily takes time away from more fruitful journalistic and production activities. In fact, I'd argue that, where blogging is an integral part of the process of journalism or production, it's quite beneficial to both the final product and audience's understanding of it.
In November 2006, in a lengthy post titled "What's the Point of TV and Radio Blogs?", I explained that blogging would:
- Allow us to join in conversations about the topics we cover and programmes we make
- Bring some of the 91Èȱ¬'s best and most widely recognised talent closer to their audiences
- Make it easier for journalists and programme makers to gain exposure to and learn from the knowledge and experiences of our audiences
- Make our editorial decisions and policies, as well as our production values and techniques, more transparent and those who make them more accountable
These remain the core reasons why the 91Èȱ¬ Blog Network exists and, because our blogs each tend to have a different style, voice and audience, they each tend to focus more or less strongly on each of the goals above.
For example, Radio 2 Presenter Chris Evans' blog is much like a personal diary, bringing audiences closer to the man behind the microphone. As of Evans' blog:
"He actually comes over as being quite like how he is on TV, which is to say that he seems to be a happy-go-lucky, decent bloke. All in all, the kind of chap you wouldn't mind spending some time in the company of."
, Radio 5 Live's Pods and Blogs, and the new Radio 4 programme iPM are all using their blogs in a different way - to engage with and tap into the knowledge and creativity of their audiences.
The Editors, Sport Editors and this, the 91Èȱ¬ Internet blog, are all about bringing transparency and accountability to the services provided by different divisions of the 91Èȱ¬.
There have also been many less obvious, but no less important, more general successes - some of which have brought concrete changes to the content and services we provide online and on-air. For example:
- The first use on bbc.co.uk of embedded videos from and other video sharing websites took place on the blogs
- The 91Èȱ¬'s first experiments of one-click links to add pages to social bookmarking and recommendation services was on our blogs, with all and pages now carrying such links
- We first started experimenting with the use of third party photo sharing sites such as as a way to ingest and manage audience photo submissions on the blogs, a technique now used more widely
I've bookmarked many other examples, as well as bloggers' reaction to some of what we've been doing, .
In addition to having recently commissioned a technical review of the infrastructure behind the 91Èȱ¬ Blogs Network, something I wrote about on Monday, many people around the 91Èȱ¬ have recently been taking stock of the blogs they're responsible for and thinking about the future for them.
People do, of course, define in many different ways, but most bloggers I know tend to see their blog not just as a publishing tool but as a tool enables a one-to-one or many-to-many conversation. One way to do this is via the comment facility at the bottom of each blog post.
Steve Herrmann, Editor of the 91Èȱ¬ News Website, is enthusiastic about some of the exciting things he's seen on the 91Èȱ¬ News Blogs, but admits that:
"Responding to comments consistently across the blogs continues to be one of the biggest challenges for all concerned."
Another way to engage in the conversation is to seek out and link to the thoughts and content of other bloggers - and here, except for in a few examples, we're doing pretty poorly. The preliminary results of the technical review being conducted by Headshift has revealed that only about 1 in 8 posts on a 91Èȱ¬ Blog link out. Based on the many conversations I've had with the 91Èȱ¬'s bloggers, only a handful utilise tools like to proactively track and engage in conversations their blog could be a part of.
So we're pretty good at using blogs as a publishing platform. But we're not doing as well as we could engaging with the conversations our blogs could, and in many instances should, be a part of.
We also have some difficult challenges ahead. We need to refresh our current technical infrastructure, and improve the way we deal with comment spam and engage with legitimate comments. We need to ensure that ideas for good blogs make it through whatever editorial approval process is required whilst keeping the bad ideas from seeing the light of day. We need to close some of our less well looked after existing blogs, the ones which don't benefit from the nurturing hand of someone with an "inner blogger".
In the coming weeks I expect to be able to return with some more insight into the technical review and resulting recommendations I've alluded to in this post.
We've been canvassing opinion (with the unexpected affect that one of our internal sessions ) both inside and outside the 91Èȱ¬. Now it's time to hear from you.
What sort of blogs do you think the 91Èȱ¬ should, or shouldn't, do in the future? What process do you think should be applied in making those decisions? How might we improve the way we use our blogs not just to publish content but to participate in the wider conversations taking place around 91Èȱ¬ content and the topics and stories we cover?
I look forward to your thoughts...
Robin Hamann is a senior community producer.
Comments
Your blogs are a very welcome thing at the 91Èȱ¬. They do give us users a chance to express our opinions, even if I am not sure they get to the top decision makers?
However I would like to see some sort of subject tree bringing together blogs of the same or similar subjects. For example, one subject heading/link to take me to all the blogs about the iPlayer or about Strictly Come Dancing... etc
Could you propose a menu tree to make it easier to get at the subjects people are interested in?
If this one gets through ... (sigh)
The comment failure issue is extremely serious and how you are dealing with it is terrible and about as un-customer focussed as it's possible to be.
Don't think of it as a technical issue, think of it as a customer service issue.
You need to be upfront about the system's issues *on the blogs themselves*.
If someone cannot post, they won't come back and your mission of getting feedback is shot.
Your error message is a classic example of how not to do it. You should be much more usable and user-friendly and then maybe some of the failed commentators might come back (I have some 404 examples on my blog, here's one You don't even have any help information which acknowledges your technical issues ('why your comment may have failed').
I have met some brilliant 91Èȱ¬ usability people - maybe you need some of them in on your 'reviews'.
I have tested the "new" comments service on a buffalo story on bbc PM site
It seemed to work quickly
Let's test this
0934 on Feb 23rd 2008