Forget your beat and start a blog

The age of the internet has brought on a completely different form of writing: blogging. Blogging takes all the techniques of writing for the internet and combines them in one. The blog combines text, video, audio, and photographs and yet still manages to kick it up a notch by encouraging readers to contribute their opinion.

According to the Annenberg School of Communication, blogging “engages readers in a productive conversation through comments posted to the blog.” With the hundreds of comments that blogs collect monthly, daily, and even hourly, internet news consumers are trading in the traditional hearing the news and are now responding to the news.

Whether it’s Perez Hilton’s celebrity gossip page or the Huffington Post, online news consumers are being turned on to the interactivity of blogging. And why wouldn’t they? Bloggers, as Poytner points out, are quick to the point and know their audience. Bloggers make their news more personal and cater specifically to what their readers want to see.

So at the end of the day, journalists might want to drop their beats and start a blog to attract the new wave of online news consumers who are people that don’t only want the news, but also, want to respond to it.