What Kind of Blogger Do You Want to Be?

Are bloggers journalists? That debate has stirred considerable passion over the years. But turn the question around and there is no debate: nearly all professional journalists today write or edit blogs. It’s part of the job description.

Certainly, many serious bloggers do independent reporting, consult and link to primary sources, verify facts, and maintain high ethical standards, just as professional journalists do.

Other bloggers prefer to write opinion pieces. Using a blog to establish context, they provide fresh and clear viewpoints, contributing valuable arguments. Even amateurish bloggers do add to societal conversation and, at least to some extent, information.

Before you set up your blog and start posting your work, it helps to figure out what kind of blogger you want to be.

Remember the novel Moby Dick? Herman Melville’s peg-legged Captain Ahab, who hunted the oceans for the white whale who took his leg, would go below deck and “refer to piles of old log-books beside him, wherein were set down the seasons and places in which, on various former voyages of various ships, sperm whales had been captured or seen.”

Had Ahab had the capacity and desire to share his ship’s logs with the world, he’d have been a blogger. In keeping his ship’s log—a record of where he had been and what he had seen, heard, and learned on his journeys—Ahab was a particular kind of journalist: he was a reporter.

A reporter gathers facts, decides how to organize and write up those facts in an effective, useful, and engaging way, and disseminates his or her account to an audience. If that is the kind of blogger you choose to be, you will be a reporter, whether you work at a big professional news organization or on your screened-in front porch.

“The journalism of the future is going to blur across economic sources, across styles of work, across the divide between professional and amateur,” Michael Schudson, a sociologist of journalism and professor at Columbia University’s Journalism School, said in a 2010 speech.

Think of the reporter-blogger as a modern-day equivalent of the town crier, telling fellow citizens the news. That news needs to be carefully vetted, accurate, and either documented or attributed to respected people, or sources, who have the knowledge to pass it on.

Here’s a story by Adam Gaffin, a citizen-journalist who runs a news blog and website called Universal Hub that covers the neighborhoods of Boston:

Bennett’s name is underlined because it links to his website. This post is also accompanied by a YouTube video on which Bennett announces his candidacy. The post is short and simple. But it conveys the news: Doug Bennett is running for office yet again despite two past defeats. And it uses a link and multimedia so the reader with time and interest can go deeper.

There’s a second kind of blogger, someone who analyzes and comments on events and other news. This blogger, an “opinion blogger,” is somewhat akin to the old-time pamphleteer. Opinion bloggers base their views on information, too. It can be gathered by the bloggers themselves or based on materials found elsewhere and shared as links in a blogger’s piece. But opinion bloggers go beyond gathering material. They draw conclusions from it. They take a stand and exhort people to act or react.

Howard Cohen, a pop music critic for the Miami Herald, started writing a blog about the TV show American Idol in 2005. Here’s his blog post telling readers what he thinks about the show on the eve of the last episode of its 11th season.

In traditional newspaper journalism, opinion pieces are known as “op-eds.” Most newspapers have an editorial page, in which the newspaper, in earnest prose, takes a position on an issue of the day. Editorials are not signed because they are meant to be read as the opinion of the newspaper.

But on the page opposite the editorial page (hence the term “op-ed”), newspapers run bylined opinion columns. These writers comment on the issues of the day, too, but they speak for themselves, not the news organization. Op-ed columnists and contributors attract readers with their views and also their style and personality. They don’t just badger readers with their views; they connect with them.

Put another way, traditional op-ed writers have a voice. Traditional reporters have a different, more restrained, voice. In blogging, voice matters regardless of the style or topic (see Chapter 4, “Writing as Rap,” page 65). Engaging readers matters, something we’ll discuss later.

For now, just keep this in mind: voice isn’t something writers put on like a pair of rain boots or a colorful scarf. It is, in a sense, something writers are, or become, when they listen closely to the cadence and style of their own words.

How to Blog Effectively

All blog writing has its baseline rules, regardless of type. Here are our dandy dozen. Stick them in your smartphone, your egg crate, or however you cart things around. Refer to them frequently.

We’ll elaborate on these throughout the book.

1. Keep the focus of each post narrow.
   • Don’t try to say too much; stay on point.

2. Write short headlines that summarize and sell.
   • Headlines draw the reader into the post. They must be clear. They can be clever, too.

3. Write in chunks: keep your paragraphs short.
   • Reading off computer screens takes about 25 percent longer than reading from paper.

4. Write in the active voice: Subject → Verb → Object.
   • Verbs power sentences.

5. Mix post lengths and styles.
   • Give the reader choices.

6. Write regularly.
   • Try to post something at least weekly.

7. Be yourself.
   • Blogging is a conversation. No one talks long to a blowhard or phony.

8. Provide links.
   • Share your sources and other interesting stuff with the reader.

9. Put breaks between paragraphs.
   • Give the reader white space, subheds, and bulleted lists to make reading easier.

10. Don’t overdo boldface or italics or other font styles.
    • It hurts the reader’s eyes.

11. Include visual cues.
    • Photos, slide shows, and video add pizzazz.

12. Copyedit and proofread.
    • Sloppy writing has no credibility.

Establishing a Focus

Before you sit down to write a blog post, know what you want to say. That’s how the pros do it.

That doesn’t mean you can’t sit down and write a disorganized jumble of things you know or think about a topic. It doesn’t mean you can’t write a first draft so rough you’d be embarrassed to show it to your dog. Both can be helpful in figuring out what you want to say. But do those things before you sit down to write your actual blog post.

Every good piece of writing, from a quick note to your roommate to a cinder-block-sized novel, has one focus, one overarching thing it wants to say. It may be small, and it may have sweep. It may be “wash the dishes!” or it may be “human motives are irrational.”

Many bloggers commit the offense against good writing of wandering from topic to topic in the same blog post. When a writer wanders, the reader can’t follow and stops bothering to try. Keep your focus narrow. Write about one topic—how to make a lemon poppyseed scone, what to pack for a music festival, or where to find a farmer’s market—and one topic only.

One of the best ways to narrow your topic and develop a clear focus is to imagine a friend asking, “So, what are you writing about?” and answering in one sentence. You don’t even have to imagine: write a one-sentence email or a text to a friend that begins, “I’m writing a blog post about …” and finish the sentence. Think of it as a focus statement—a single, simple statement of what you want your blog post to say.

Remember learning about outlines when you were a kid in school? You have your Roman numerals as main topics (I, II, III), then capital letters as sub-topics (A, B, C), with Arabic numeral for sub-sub-topics (1, 2, 3), and lower-case letters (a, b, c) for sub-sub-sub-topics, and so on.

Forget all that. You do need to outline anything you’re going to write that’s longer than a few paragraphs. But you don’t need all the apparatus of formal outlines. What you need are directions—the same kind of directions you’d get if you were in a new city and stopped a native to ask where you can find the nearest pub. You need just enough information to know how to get where you’re going.

You may want to write a blog post about what to bring to an outdoor music festival. That might be your focus statement: “What to bring to a day-long outdoor music festival.” No, wait. Let’s liven this up. New focus statement: “The seven essentials to bring to a day-long, outdoor music festival.”

Now you know your outline needs seven items. This is sometimes called a “jot outline.” Just jot down enough information to get you from the start to the end of your piece of writing.

Lede: what to bring to for a day at an outdoor music fest—seven things. (For now, this will do. In writing, you’ll want to liven it a bit. Maybe, “You’ve been there, arrived, psyched, for a day of outdoor music and it starts to pour. Or the sun scorches. Or you can’t see the stage for the glare. Here are seven things to remember before leaving home.”)

• Water—sealed container
• Wallet—just cash and ID, leave rest home
• Snacks—prepackaged in case you can’t bring food in (energy bars)
• Sunscreen—max strength
• Lip balm—wind/sun will chap lips
• Sunglasses—cheap ones b/c you might lose them
• Poncho—lightweight. Can double as a ground cloth

Once you’ve got a focus and you know the overall shape of your blog post, start writing for real. One last tip: as you write, look forward and not backward. What you want to do in your first draft is make words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into an engaging and informative piece of writing. Write what you have to say from start to finish. Then, when you’ve reached the end, you can go back and begin to rewrite for clarity, precision, and conciseness.

Fungai Machirori

“The mission is to tell as many stories as we can”

There is much that is personal and practical in the remarkable blog Her Zimbabwe (http://herzimbabwe.co.zw/), from a piece in early 2015 on reusable menstrual pads to another on “Unsilencing Depression.” There’s nothing trivial. But then, everyday life for women in this struggling African nation is very different than it is for women in developed Western nations.

Fungai Machirori

Begun by Fungai Machirori in 2012 “to harness the potential of digital media to share and tell Zimbabwean women’s stories,” the blog and its writers are voices of substance, style, and courage in a politically unsettled land. After an introduction from a former student, Nadine Hoffman, deputy director of the International Women’s Media Foundation, Machiori talked to the authors about her mission as a blogger and what she hoped to accomplish:

How was the vision of Her Zimbabwe born?

I was studying towards a master’s degree in International Development and my dissertation centered on Zimbabwean women’s organizing. Over the years of political and economic upheaval, we have seen widespread migration of Zimbabweans to countries across the world, including South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia. As such, social relations and cohesion have become somewhat fragmented. I wanted to study this fragmentation and understand if there were points of commonality that still existed among Zimbabwean women organizing in the diaspora, and those organizing locally in Zimbabwe.

One of the recommendations I put forward was that there was need to explore the role that digital media could play in collapsing the geographical space between Zimbabwean women. I also fully understood that the use of digital media could potentially create its own hierarchy of access—Zimbabwe has a quite low Internet penetration rate of about 30 percent of the entire population, whereas many in the diaspora enjoy unlimited access. All the same, I realized that I could keep my interrogation at a purely theoretical or academic level, or I could attempt to put it into practice. Also, I didn’t want to write a dissertation that no one would implement. So I took the onus upon myself to effect my own recommendations.

That’s how the vision was born, although it has changed somewhat along the way. In the initial stages, Her Zimbabwe was more or less an experiment and we took in all kinds of content, some of which was not as cogent and analytical as we now attempt to be on the platform. Now, Her Zimbabwe is more about encouraging and cultivating thought leadership and provocative discussion. It is also about documenting the stories that often go undocumented, because ask anyone in the West what they know about Zimbabwe and the usual responses will be, “Robert Mugabe, AIDS, and hunger.” Of course, these issues and personalities are quite real. But they are reductive and incomplete. So we are really trying to fill in the other parts of our experience.

What in your mind is the blog’s overall mission?

I think I have already alluded to it. But I would say our mission, above and beyond engaging Zimbabweans and the broader world in conversation and thought, is to ensure that 100 years from now, when to whomever it is that we shall leave this earth looks for information on Zimbabwe, they shall find our work there too. We want there to be alternative narratives and counter-narratives, diversity and nuance about our experience. Perhaps this has more to do with our vision, but the mission is to tell as many stories as we can.

The site seems as much a place of community as it does a place of news. Do you think of it that way too?

Yes, I think many of those who write for us feel a sense of having found community. There aren’t many spaces for Zimbabweans to write about themselves, and even more limited space for women to write about their lived realities. So many of the writers are people I know personally, people we’ve invested some time with getting to know and understand, and also people who know each other through their work, which converges on our site. They are definitely part of a community.

Whom do you have in mind when you post to the site?

Admittedly, the discourse is not what one would call “basic,” for want of a better word. But we also don’t write work that is convoluted and hard to comprehend. We introduce complex topics through accessible language and anecdotes. So our content is really for anyone who would like to challenge themselves to think more variedly and to expose themselves to new ideas. But of course by nature of our platform, our content is only accessible via the Internet. Additionally, the content is largely for an audience conversant in English, although we do intend to introduce more vernacular content as we go along.

The blog takes on some intimate and personal subjects but gives its advice in the context of stories. Is this something you and your writers work to do?

We don’t really work on it. Things seem to just come that way for most of them. Most are bloggers anyway, so this is the conversational style that I suppose they naturally use. Our editing is more around angling and building themes within work.

How difficult is it to maintain a strong voice of independence in a country without a strong tradition of press freedom?

We’ve never had anyone approach us on our work, so we’ve never had to deal with any of it. We have brought up questions about the country’s leadership and different political figures within this space, but no one has ever threatened and intimidated us.

What are your goals for the future?

We would like to be a stable entity, with a decent staff complement and a growing editorial team. We just want to tell as many stories as we possibly can.

The Basics of Reporting and Writing a News Blog

Organizing and Writing Your Reporter Blog Post

In his book A Writer Teaches Writing, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and writing teacher Donald Murray explains writing as a process with three steps: Collect, Order, Clarify. Following these steps, a writer should answer these three questions when writing:

1. What do I have to say?
2. What’s the most effective way to say it?
3. Have I said what I wanted to say?

Imagine, for a moment, that you are writing a note to your roommates asking them to clean up the dirty dishes in the sink.

First, you have to decide what it is you want to communicate. Do you want them to wash the pots and pans, or just the dishes? Do you want them to put away the clean dishes on the bottom shelf of the cabinet or the middle shelf?

Then you decide how to say it. Do you want the note to be curt and bossy, or do you want it to be friendly but prodding? Do you want to excoriate them for always leaving dirty dishes in the sink, or do you just want to suggest that the apartment would be a more pleasant place if this particular batch of dirty dishes were cleaned and put away?

Once you’ve written your note, you look it over. Does it have the voice and tone you want? Is it clear about what you want your roommates to do?

In writing news stories or blog posts, Murray’s Collect phase is your reporting: writing down what you see and hear, conducting interviews, making phone calls, looking over documents, searching the Internet for background information. Good writing builds off content.

When you sit down to write, think about Order: What form will this story take? What information in my notes is the most important (and what do I leave out)? What does the reader need to know to understand what I have learned in my reporting?

The last stage is Clarify. Don’t click the “Post” button as you type the final word. Instead, step away from the computer for a bit. Clear your head. Then go back and reread what you’ve written to make sure that it is clear, focused, and clean (no typos). Read your work aloud. It’s the best way to catch errors and awkward sentences. Finally, set aside time to revise. Trim unnecessary words. Add a good example. Eliminate a sentence or paragraph that’s off point. Good writers draft and then revise. The latter too often gets ignored. Even if you have only 10 minutes, use the time well.

Keep this in mind: if you’re writing news, it’s usually best to get to the point quickly. Then elaborate on the main point before providing smaller details or introducing secondary themes. If you’ve studied the basics of news writing, this may sound familiar. It is the basis of what’s long been known as the inverted pyramid. This short, sharp, and direct writing form can be even more essential in writing for the web than in newspapers.

Consider this. The average web page or blog user stays on the page for less than a minute. Mobile phone users stay on web pages for even less time. The inverted pyramid format allows you to make the focus of your blog post instantly clear and to organize the information that follows in descending order of importance. Here’s an example from the Associated Press:

The Lede

The first paragraph of your post is known as the lede, pronounced leed. (The odd spelling is a bit of journalism jargon that keeps the name for a first paragraph from being confused with lead, which can be pronounced led.) The lede summarizes your story’s main point. It’s built around the most newsworthy fact or facts. Here are some tips in writing one:

Convey the news. Of all the information you have collected, choose the key facts that sum up the story to tell the reader what happened.

Keep it short. Try to keep your first paragraph to a single sentence no longer than 25 words. You should be able to read it aloud in one breath.

Write in the active voice. Use a subject → verb → object construction.

Put the news in context. Use a short second sentence or a single phrase in the first to alert readers to related essential to understanding what’s new—the news—in a lede. This related information is called context. It must be limited to what’s really important. Many stories don’t need context in the lede.

Here is that Universal Hub lede again, its context in boldface:

In writing a lede, the first step is always to find the news. To do so, imagine your mother asking you, “What are you working on?” Tell her in one sentence. That’s likely your lede or close to it.

Here is an example that fits within that 25-word guideline:

The Body

A news blog post needs unity. Everything in it should expand on, amplify, and add information to the facts in the lede. Why? Because, as we said earlier, blog posts need a tight focus. Each post should be built around a single, dominant idea. The lede summarizes it. What follows should answer the questions the lede provokes in readers. As you write further, it helps to think like a reader: What would you want to know next?

Let’s try an example.

If someone told you that there had just been a car accident at Elm and Main streets, what would you want to know next? “Anyone hurt?” you might ask. Then, “What happened?” Then you’d ask about the details—who was involved? (You’d want names, since you live nearby.)

If you think like a reader, organizing your blog post will come easily.

A few other tips:

Blogging Your Opinions

Notes Rebecca Blood, who began her blog Rebecca’s Pocket in 1999 when there were only a hundred or so blogs on the Internet: “Write about what you love. A weblog is the place for strong opinions, whether about politics, music, social issues, gardening, or your profession. The more engaged you are with your subject, the more interesting your writing will be.”

On her blog’s “About” page, Blood describes her blog as “devoted to highlighting whatever catches my attention, and I’m interested in lots of things.”

Back in 2006, the Pew Internet & American Life Project reported that 12 million Americans had a blog. Pew surveyed bloggers and asked them, among other questions, what they blogged about. More than a third answered that they blogged about their personal lives and experiences. The next most popular topic for bloggers was politics. If you’re not ardent about politics, no problem—you undoubtedly have strong opinions that you want to share about some other topics.

We’ve talked about the writing process as Collect, Order, and Clarify. The opinion blogger, too, has to collect, but in this case in a couple of ways. The first is to collect a list of ideas: the notepad app of most mobile phones is a good place to keep a list (if you’re old-fashioned, a small, pocket-sized pad works, too). Next, you, as opinion writer, have to collect your thoughts, to think about what you want to write about and why. This may be prompted by “string” you’ve gathered— weblinks to reported pieces and editorials you’ve filed away, original reports, polls or studies you’ve saved, or other bits and pieces of information. Or you may now need to collect information to help support your argument.

Whatever the exact order, you, as an opinion writer, have to not only decide what argument you want to make, but how and why. What information backs up your viewpoint? What do you have to say that 10 people haven’t said before you? Are you offering a fresh take or perspective?

This is important because, as with all journalism, originality matters. Opinion blogs have been referred to as a vast echo chamber of people with the same opinion on a topic, all writing their own blog posts. By all means, have your own opinions. But you’ll draw readers by synthesizing and analyzing existing information in interesting ways. A good opinion piece doesn’t just say, “I believe such and such.” It shows the reader why and advances the argument in a unique and distinctive way. That takes not only practice. It takes homework—research to find information.

You have to know something about the subject you’re writing about because you’ll have readers who know the subject well.

We recommend gathering your research in a text file that will serve as your notebook when you begin to write. Don’t just take notes. Keep the web address of the web page where you found the information, so you can link to it in your blog post. This is a form of attribution in blogging that helps establish your credibility.

Now you’re ready to write. Well, almost. First, go back one step. Sit and think some more about how the information you’ve gathered supports your opinion. Make a quick outline of the structure of your blog post.

Below are the first three paragraphs of a blog post written by Mark Leccese about CNN reporting information from a diary kept by the murdered U.S. Ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens. It was found by a reporter in the wreckage of the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi.

Mark kept the notes he made while researching this blog post (he always keeps his notes) and the quick outline he made of what he wanted to say. You’ll find a shortened version of his notes and outline below. Remember, when we talk about an outline, we’re not talking the kind of outline your eighth-grade English teacher required, with Roman numerals and capital letters and small letters—just a series of main points that helps you organize thoughts as you write.

• —CNN ethical failure
• —Gov’t doc vs. private diary
• —Clip from Wednesday AC 360 http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2012/09/19/amb-chris-stevens-worried-about-al-qaeda-hit-list/
• —change Fri—clip from Fri AC 360 http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/bestoftv/2012/09/22/ac-stevens-security-concerns.cnn.html
• —WSJ story—family did not want diary made public http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443890304578012473529847226.html?mod=djkeyword
• —AP story—CNN promised family http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/cnn-posts-report-of-diary-of-slain-ambassador-stevens-us-state-dept-says-family-had-objected/2012/09/22/15ae33b6-0514-11e2-9132-f2750cd65f97_story.html
• —CNN statement — http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2012/09/22/cnn-statement-about-ambassador-stevens-journal/
• —Why CNN statement wrong—key points

Mark’s outline starts with opinion, moves to research so he can explain to his readers (with links to the stories) what happened, and ends with opinion. The research is essential to this blog post—a blogger needs to show the reader what he or she is giving an opinion about.

Mark did so by providing these underlined links to his online sources:

If your post needs information that is missing, do more research. You’ve got to anchor your argument.

It sounds like a lot of work, but it shouldn’t take that long—and we say “shouldn’t” in two senses of the word: it won’t take long, and you can’t let it take that long. One of the most important aspects of successful opinion bloggers is speed. Bloggers must post while the topic is still fresh, and the news cycle in the twenty-first century is lightning fast.

Tips for Writing a Strong Opinion Blog Post

State your main point in the first sentence. Or, if you don’t do it in the first sentence, do it in the second or third. Readers come to your blog because they want to know what you think. Tell them.

Make your main point with specifics. Let’s say you’re writing a blog post lamenting how cable television news has changed for the worse since its inception and that you believe CNN is to blame. You might write a first sentence that reads:

True enough. But what’s new here? And how has it been a “major force in American journalism?” A better opening to your blog post would be:

Take a strong position without being obnoxious about it. Many bloggers, alone at their computers, hurl insult and invective across the Internet. But you’re not going to persuade people by shouting at them and hectoring them. Nor do you want to be tepid. Make a strong point, then back it up. That CNN blog might continue like this:

Use your research to back up and demonstrate your main point. Your research can be facts you gathered reporting. It also can be information learned from living your life. So you might write:

In the example above, the blogger would link to both examples cited. In blogging on a more local story, the writer might rely on personal experience in building an argument. Consider a blog post arguing that a stop sign is needed at the intersection near where you live. You’ll know plenty about the issue without consulting a library database. Personal expertise counts, too.

You have to engage readers if you want to inform them. Even though a blog is a journal, it’s not like a personal journal you may keep under lock and key—the point of a blog is to communicate with others.

The burden is on you, the writer, to draw the readers into your blog with good, clean, clear writing. You want readers to respond. That won’t happen unless they read to the end.

Go ahead, use the first person pronoun. The word “I” is frowned upon in most journalistic writing. Not in the blogosphere. Blog readers want to know the blogger, to make a connection. The best and most widely read bloggers have personalities that come through in their writing.

What matters in an opinion blog is the opinion, not fancy writing. Make your point simple (which is different from simplistic) and clear. Avoid overuse of adjectives and adverbs; the sturdiest writing relies on nouns and verbs.

Use anecdotes, analogies, and examples to illustrate your points for the reader. Opinion writing can get lost in abstractions; anecdotes bring people into your argument, people who are acting. Example and analogy can help make a complex point simpler to understand. You could write that a year of tuition, room, and board at a private college is an onerous expense for students and their families. Or you could write that a stack of dollar bills equal to a year of tuition, room, and board at a private college would be two stories high or could feed a family of four for more than five years. Just make sure your analogies are accurate.

End with something for your reader to take away. Finish your blog post with a thought, a suggestion, a call to action, or even a simple summary of the opinion you have just expressed. Circling back to where you began can help leave readers with a sense of emphasis, too. You want your blog post to stay in the reader’s mind well after the reader has walked away from the computer.

Here are the first and the last paragraphs of a blog post written by author Jerry Lanson in the wake of the mass murder in Newtown, Connecticut:

Go back and reread what you’ve written. We’ll say the same thing we said about publishing a news blog post: don’t type the final period in your post and then click the “Post” button. Walk away from your computer, and, when you return, ask yourself these questions. Do you have a strong main point at the start of your post? Do you use examples and information as evidence to back up your main point? Do all the sentences make grammatical sense? Look for missing words (a problem that bedevils one of the authors) and typos. If you have the time, ask someone to proofread your post before you send it out across the World Wide Web.

Then post and get ready for the comments to pour in.