You must plan it. Multiplatform students should check out this description on beginning a blog. Beat Reporting students, your blogs will be published on The Doaneline.
Determine your blog's purpose, its goal. For Beat Reporters, your blog should complement the stories you write on your beat. Multiplatform students have more leeway about what they want to blog about.
You should make your blog different from the coverage we're already doing.
To help you create a plan, ask yourself:
- What will you name your blog?
- What is a good catch phrase, a good short description, of your blog? How would you explain it, in a few words, to your friends.
- What will you write about?
To build an audience for your blog:
- Post good posts regularly, preferably five times a week. Regularly schedule time to blog. For beat reporters, use the blog as a notebook, compiling your notes and story ideas and getting comments from readers/viewers. Let them help you focus on what stories they want to see.
- Write effective headlines
- Get involved in the community
To get involved, try:
- Putting the reader first
- Organize your thoughts. Everything you write should refer to the purpose of your post.
- Be to the point. Use short sentences, grafs and words. Include readers. Don't be a "know it all."
- Develop a conversational style of writing. Give your blog a distinctive voice. Try writing as if you're dashing off an e-mail to a friend. You can use first person. You can use humor. You can experiment. But try to make it conversational
- Use lots of bullets, bold text, subheads, quotes, etc.
- Use links effectively, summarize and analyze. But don't use too many links. Avoid obvious links and those to well-known Web sites. Also, avoid paid sites. Include only links that have value to your readers.
- Be specific with headlines
- Use photos or screenshots
Here are a few examples of news blogs:
If you get comments, great! That's the idea. But remember that you can delete any comment. It's your blog, after all. Just don't delete comments simply because you disagree with them. Read your comments often and respond to them occasionally, just not all the time.
I know this is longer than most blog posts would be. Sorry about that. But I hope it was helpful. Let me know.
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