Tuesday, November 16, 2004



Within the BBC, there's currently some debate and head-scratching taking place over whether employees should be allowed to keep personal blogs -- and if so, whether policies need to be formulated to advise staff on what they should and should not talk about in the public domain.

It's obviously an area of some interest to me -- although I'm glad to say that the approach so far has been marked by dialogue and consultation rather than confrontation.

There's no sign that I'm going to be silenced just yet.

It's interesting, therefore, to see how NBC reacted to last night's genuine scoop by its correspondent Kevin Sites -- who's also a blogger.

Sites and I both blogged from Northern Iraq during the war last year, earning ourselves the "war blogger" tag -- although thankfully he emerged from the conflict unscathed.

Rather than playing down or ignoring Sites' blogging activity, NBC actively promoted it on air.

It's the clearest sign yet that some broadcasters are beginning to understand and even embrace blogging by staffers -- even though what they write is beyond their editorial control.

As more and more mainstream news outlets experiment with blogs in various ways, perhaps some of the suspicion that journalists would "give away trade secrets" or keep all their best material back for their blogs is beginning to fade.

I hope blogs like mine and Kevin's have shown that personal websites by journalists need not trouble our paymasters unduly. Indeed, they very often enhance and enrich the work we produce in our day jobs by providing a "rough draft" we can feed into the polished pieces that make it onto the air or into print.

NBC's response to Kevin's exclusive is very different from that of his former employer, CNN, which asked him to shut down his blog during last year's war. Long may it continue.

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

posting anon because Blogger makes you register. yuck
I have one wish for Sites - he gets out of there before one of the good guys accidentally shoots him.

4:21 PM  
Blogger pdberger said...

Hi Stuart. I hope the BBC bosses leave you alone.

One of the most important aspects of blogging is freedom. Once head office starts telling you what you can and can't write your blog is doomed. After all, they are only going to want to control the things you want to write most about!

8:48 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

over the four year life span of my blog so far, i've worked for two papers... both accepted it (even if in the early days it was with a lot of confusion and a little confrontation).

obviously i'm not posting anything as news-worthy or interesting as you or sites - mainly because we have our own work blogs of various denominations, so my own blog remains personal rather than professional - but i think different media organisations take different attitudes to blogging.

most of the good ones, i think, realise that it's good for PR (on a company level) and for networking (on a personal one).

bobbie

6:41 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Congrats to Kevin Sites on becoming embedded with Al Zaqawi's Iraqi Jahad. You covered a great journalistic story at the expense of a patriotic young American who would have gave his life for YOUR safety. So, come on, we hope you don't go losing your head over it.

5:41 AM  

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