Blogging Orientation

The news section hasn't had that much success with blogs.

The big one was two years ago. That was when we launched SpecBlogs, a new media initiative which experienced a number of problems. First and foremost was a matter of staffing -- SpecBlogs didn't have a full set of content contributors and so if nobody wrote on a given day, there wasn't much accountability. Beyond that, though, was a greater problem of consistency. I once wrote a 1,000 word analysis on the University's sexual assault policy and another post giving a floor-by-floor description of what would be found in the Nexus (a document, by the way, which I wish I still had. Sadly, once the now-defunct SpecBlogs shutdown, all of the content was lost.) These competed with quippy and quirky 100 word writeups and free food announcements. There were pieces about Columbia, pieces about college in general, and pieces that were apparently random to everything else. It was generally all good content, but so scattered that it was hard for anybody to latch onto it.

Meanwhile, Bwog launched within a week of SpecBlogs with a real staff, a stronger sense of what their mission was, a consistent feel to the articles, and regular features. At least during the week, they updated something like five times daily to make their site something to come back to frequently. They were getting readers and we weren't. This made writing for the derisively-dubbed "Splogs" a venture with little payoff, and nobody wanted to write for it, which meant fewer posts, fewer people checking the site, and... you can see the vicious circle. The people who might have had an interest in blogging mostly went over to the Blue and White, and at some point, after something like two weeks without a single post, it went down with a whimper.

There's something else, too. It was clear from many of the comments that a large number of students were sick of the one-paper campus and were happy to see a little competition from a regular news source that felt a little less buttoned down. The crashing of SpecBlogs turned me off of the idea of Spec putting out a comprehensive campus blog and I have never looked back.

That said, the spark in the first few weeks of the blog before it came tumbling down as well as the continued success of Bwog proved that it was possible-even for Spec --to put out a blog that people enjoyed. I'm a guy who reads a lot of blogs--my Google Sidebar currently lists 24 feeds and there are more in a ticker that moves across the bottom of my Firefox browser, and news writers like being able to blog because it's so much faster and less-restricted than the paper is.

The trick, as the Housing blog, College Dems Midterm Election 2006 blog, and the Orientation blog (Averaging more than 300 hits per day and it got linked to by Gothamist --not bad for almost no advertising) I believe have shown, is to keep it focused. Spreading ourselves out across dozens of content areas or trying to do a job which needs five hours of work per day with a diffuse staff is going to put out a crappy product. But if we set limits on what we're doing--focus on a specific topic or for a specific amount of time--it's totally manageable. I would imagine that, at least for the news section going forward, blogging that gets done will be done along this model.