Michele Day's List: Blogging-why

By Robert Niles of Online Journalism Review -- August 2010
Students will be arriving (or returning) to journalism schools over the next month, providing me with a convenient excuse to offer students some beginning-of-the-year advice.

CNN story from 2006

By Michelle Rafter, a freelance writer

Mark S. Luckie, a digital journalist who combines his love for journalism with his passion for technology, writes the blog 10,000 Words.
He included blogging as one of his eight things. Other advice: create portfolio, talk to your professor and more. ... Links to portfolio examples

By Adam Westbrook, a multimedia journalist from London, as part of a series on blogging in August, 2010.

In this week-long series, I'll be explaining why you really can't ignore blogging if you're a journalist. I'll guide you through the basics of getting started, and reveal some top tricks for making blogging work for you.

Ryan Sholin, former newspaper journalist who's now director of news innovation for Publish2, a web publishing platform, wrote this. My advice to journalism students starts with this: Blog. That doesn't mean you have to blog about journalism, or build a rabid political audience, or chronicle every step the Googles and Twitters and Apples of the world take.\n\nIt just means that you maintain a Web site where you write on a somewhat regular basis.

Steve Buttry gave this advice to students at the University of Kentucky in 2009:
"Blog. Whether for work or on your own, you need to blog. Become a voice in the digital conversation. Link to the work you like and say something insightful enough that people start linking to you."

Write like crazy. f you're not composing pieces for student media, write anyway. Write in your blog (start a free one here), write for a local blog, or even keep a private journal and write every day in it. This is my big resolution right here. I have to force myself to get into the writing habit.

This is 2008 advice from then-journalism student Suzanne Yada.

By Julie Posetti, a journalist and academic from Australia, for the PBS blog MediaShift in 2010

"These are pertinent points, and they highlight the second key conclusion I drew from the Congress: Social media literacy is now an essential element of journalism education and training. "[Social media] isn't just a kind of fad from someone who's an enthusiast of technology," the BBC's director of global news, Peter Horrocks, told reporters earlier this year. "I'm afraid you're not doing your job if you can't do those things. It's not discretionary.""
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By Sree Sreenivasan, a professor and Dean of Student Affairs at Columbia Journalism School and contributing editor at DNAinfo.com, a Manhattan news site. It's based on a presentation he gave with Vadim Lavrusik, a former student and contributor to the blog Mashable, about social media. March 2010
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<br/>They say journalists of the future must be bloggers and curators -- and much more.

Vadim Lavrusik, a contributor to Mashable and Columbia Journalism School grad, includes blogging in his list of traits of a journalist.

December 2009
To be a social journalist and one that engages in online communities, journalists will have to practice blogging regularly and serve as curators of other content on the Web.

By Mindy McAdams, who teaches online journalism at the University of Florida, as part of a series on multimedia proficiency in February 2009
Today's topic might seem mundane to many of you, but I always say that writing a blog with commitment, on some kind of regular schedule, makes you smarter.

By Mitch Joel, president of Twist Image, a digital marketing company, says blogging still matters more than ever in 2010.
He links to a video from 2009 featuring comments by Tom Peters and Seth Godin, who both have written books on business management, about the importance of blogging.
Peters says: No single thing in the last fifteen years - professionally - has been more important to my life than Blogging. It has changed my life. It has changed my perspective. It has changed my intellectual outlook. It has changed my emotional outlook, and it's the best damn marketing tool by an order of magnitude I've ever had... and it's free."

By Mark Berkey-Gerard, who teaches online and multimedia journalism courses at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey.
For the past few years I have used student blogs as a primary format for my introductory online journalism course. Each student selects a topic or beat to cover for the semester and creates a blog dedicated to that subject. Then students report, write, photograph, gather audio, shoot and edit video for Web, and create interactive maps and timelines. All the student work is public, and the authors must cultivate an audience.

Here he explains the many reasons he has his students blog.
Published February 2010

Detailed history of blogging published on Mashable.com in August 2010. By Josh Catone, feature editor at Mashable.

By Silvia Tolisano, who writes about education and technology on her blog, Langwitches. She says: "A blog becomes a transformative tool for learning when students can add constructive comments for each other or write for a wider audience than just their teachers."

From the PR perspective

By Gideon Burton, assistant professor of English at Brigham Young University.
"That's right. Who you are and what you've done will in the very near future be so well documented by your online activities that a resume will be redundant. \nThe time will come when a college degree will be suspect if not complemented by an admirable online record--and I'm not talking about transcripts. Your \n"transcripts" will consist of your lifestream: your blog, your social networks, your creative work published or otherwise represented online. Cyberspace is already more real to you than the physical space of your college campus--it is \nbecoming so for your future employers."