I keep telling myself I should blog more regularly and when blogging not to worry so much about every post being carefully edited, considered, re-edited, and so on. If I followed the latter then the former would occur… so here goes!
This has been kicked-started by a talk I attended yesterday by Charlie Beckett, an LSE blogger who writes a really interesting blog on Journalism & New Media.
He was talking to a group of students who are about to leave for China and in the Autumn will be starting the second year of a new masters programme that the LSE runs with Fudan university, Shanghai. The students will be blogging about their experiences on the Fudan Team blog.
It was very interesting to hear about the success of charlie’s blog. He feels it has provided a “personification” of POLIS and has enabled him to reach more people. He identified several communities of readers – those interested in Journalism & public policy, more techy journalists interested in New Media, academics in the field… It also serves a practical purpose of giving prospective students a feel for the subject area as wll as keeping friends aquaintences & colleagues up-to-date.
Charlie provided the new student bloggers with a number of tips but also kept emphasising that there are no rules.
- Blog often and don’t worry out perfection
- Bring something to each post – an article a person, a persional anecdote, an event and provide links
- Use a journalistic style: edit from the bottom up and make sure the title and first sentence offer a summary
Image: http://flickr.com/photos/zen/927495701/
