Brittney Gilbert blogs for a TV station in the Bay Area. I’ve mentioned her before, and even though I’ve moved geographically far from her coverage area, I keep up with her tweets and various postings.
Today she writes: I am not a journalist.
While I disagree (the curator is a journalist and the journalist is a curator), she lays out the logic and opportunity for the local linkblogger:
“The Bay Area is crawling with people passionate about their communities. They have their feelers out, covering the legislature, watching their streets and otherwise covering the San Francisco-area like a blanket. In fact, there are so many awesome local bloggers out there breaking and reporting news that you need a human to point you to the best and most important stuff. This, my friends, is my job.”
Does your news organization have a dedicated linkblogger, or does your staff contribute to the task of curating the local Web? If not, why not?
Comments
6 responses to “A short manifesto on local linkblogging”
I started one for my former employer, then hired a local blogger to continue it. When I moved on to another job and management decided not to stop paying for roundups, the woman who was doing them left, partnered-up with a very smart techie, and started their own site.
Now that I no longer work for the paper, I volunteer for the new site, because I’m a blogger and being part of a healthy blogging community is important to me.
The site is http://lowcountrybloggers.com and the people behind it are Heather Solos and Dan Tennant.
whoops. that should be “when management decided to stop paying for roundups.”
See also: Jason Preston at Eat Sleep Publish asks: Should your paper have an Internet section?
Ryan:
I’m pretty proud of our recent foray into link blogging here in Wilmington, N.C. We’re doing it through a group blog called The Captain on StarNewsOnline.com. Here’s a link: http://blogs.starnewsonline.com/captain/ and we also Twitter as CaptainStarNews.
We started this effort about 10 days ago and have had great results so far.
I’d love to get feedback or ideas from others on how to improve.
Robyn Tomlin
executive editor
Star-News
There is this french effort: Vendredi (Friday), a newspaper that only publishes blog posts, which is a step farther than having a blog on blogs.
Read about it here: “A BlogPaper?”
What a novel concept! 😉
http://blogs.knoxnews.com/knx/silence/archives/2004/08/welcome.shtml