Blogwatch: Why is the BBC getting involved in blogging?

Why is the BBC getting involved in blogging? It's a question that was raised in a session I was running the other day. Followed by the comment: 'Blogging is for amateurs, and provides an easy way for them to put their opinions, however flaky, online.'

It's interesting that the comment came on the day that the Baghdad Burning blog was nominated for an award a measure of how some blogs can be credible and offer a new perspective, not often portrayed by 'big media'.
But it's not just individuals getting into blogging. Big business is there too ­ with GM, IBM, Microsoft etc. using the Internet to connect with consumers. Connecting in a way that allows consumers to enter into a dialogue.

The BBC too has just started to expand it's blogging operations. The first was political editor Nick Robinson, Paul Mason of Newsnight and the World Have Your Say programme from the World Service have recently joined him.

When the BBC already operates chat forums, message boards and community sites, and lets people add comments to some news stories ­ - so what's the point of adding blogs to the mix?

It's early days and hard to tell how blogs at the beeb may develop, but some of the ideas delegates suggested were inspiring. Blogs needn't be just personality based, but could also be built around events, or the genre of programme. They'd be more interactive ordinary web pages, provide more insight to the production process and journalistic process and more depth to programming.

It's similar to the way that big business is using blogs to get closer to consumers, big media can use blogs to engage with the audience in a more one-to-one way.

Matt

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Mat The capability for an organisation to both use and show in use the range of communications channels available to its constituency is important. It is important for the Beeb with an additional remit in the world of communication. Our problem for the last three decades is that all to many people in business and politics have eschewed many channels for a range of reasons. How long before MUDS are considered an important commercial technology because of the excitement about Second Life and where Coke already has its own store. It is catch up time for corporations, already large swathes of the public are there ahead of the institutions. As you say, blogs can be used in many ways. I have recently used a blog to provide a series of 'slides ' (posts) in sequence with a podcast for each as a lecture (ePR lecture at http://netpr.blogspot.com). It is an experiment but is using the technologies in a mix and match way in which the messenger is part of the message. It is a long way from: 'Blogging is for amateurs, and provides an easy way for them to put their opinions, however flaky, online.' That this debate is about blogs misses the point. The critical issue is that there are now so many more channels and that people use different channels in different ways, circumstances and contexts.

[Damien Dempsey]

Hi Matt, An interesting post. I work at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. I manage our local interactive output. Staff working in our local radio area spend most of their time writing features for the sites. Convincing their managers that shifiting focus to faciliting interactive or community contributed content via blogs (and other apps) is no easy task. It's kind of ironic really given they have talkback radio backgrounds - gotta argue talkback radio would seem to predate blogging in the user generated content world! One issue is how we moderate and the prospect of increasing audience and thus increasing moderation workload that outpaces resources growth. I note with interest the New York Times concedes it doesn't check all posts. Our editorial policy precludes this. We have to moderate eveything. We can post-moderate in certain circumstances but we consider ourselves legally (and in terms of our editorial values) responsible for eveything we publish. I'm also interested in the quality arguments. I know this has been a big one a number of orgnisations. I like the way the Guardian has approached this in its "Comment is Free" section. The conceptual separation of news from comment is a good one. A blogger I met recently made the interesting observation that there's no such thing as citizen journalism. He posed the question "would you fly with citizen airline pilot?". His point was to let the professionally trained and experienced ones handle the news - participation needs to happen elsewhere. Anyway, my view about blogging as opposed to other forms of interactivity is that it by nature favours a quality of communication that would normally be consistent with our editorial mandate for quality. Blogs are not the place to flame . What do you reckon about all this? How's it likely to pan out a the BBC? Damien