The Chronicle‘s Dwight Silverman comments on an interesting article by New York Times columnist David Carr on journalists and blogging:
When I’m trying to sell a colleague on doing a blog (Ken Hoffman, you listening?), I tell them about how addictive it can be. For a writer who cares about what her or his readers think, I say, it’s the ultimate pleasure.
You write, your readers respond almost instantly, your original piece grows with a depth it didn’t have before they contributed to it. Even when the crowd disagrees and turns surly, what you wrote is more than it was before. It’s a conversation.
To Silverman’s credit, he’s been able to convince many of the Chronicle‘s columnists to start blogs, and that has made them and the newspaper more interesting (although some are obviously better than others). And there also are Chron group blogs that cover topics such as education and music.
What is noticeably absent after all the talk of “news as a conversation” is a Chron.com local news blog.
On any given day, the Chron city desk has put together a wealth of information that will never make it into the print newspaper because it’s too specific, or there are space limitations, or an editor won’t pull the trigger, or what have you. But that’s still potentially interesting news about our city that could be posted online for readers, where the cost of reproducing the information is minimal, and where the feedback from readers can be of value.
A group blog by the Chronicle‘s municipal reporters/columnists would seem to be a no-brainer for such a blog-heavy newspaper. Alas, there’s no such creature. Instead, we sometimes get Chron.com postings on television news reports about Houston!
