Saddle Up, Blogger

Lisa Junker, Association Publishing
December 8, 2008 | COMMENTS

Jumping into that jumble of interconnected sites called “the blogosphere” can feel like slapping open the saloon doors in a Western movie. There's loud laughter and vulgar language. Smart poker players eye each other with cool curiosity. And there's that guy who passed out in the corner two hours ago.

Okay, perhaps that last part was a stretch. But for the uninitiated, the wild world of blogs can seem overwhelming at first. And associations looking to join the party can have a hard time deciding how to start.

Sarah Boxer, a former New York Times reporter and critic and author of Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks From the Wild Web, has some advice that might make that trip through the swinging doors a little less frightening—and a lot more fun.

Associated Publishing: What makes a good blog?

Boxer: Something that's very personal, but also of like interest—something that is a topic that the writer is coming to from a personal angle, but that has larger ramifications.

Say, people writing about Governor Sarah Palin: I was just looking this morning at a very well known “mommy blog” called Dooce, where the blogger was talking about her daughter's insurance and how it relates to Palin's candidacy, her policies, and the Republican Party's policies.

A good blog provides a personal angle on public issues. Some people really aren't writing about public issues, but they write with such an appealing or edgy tone that it overcomes any sense that it's just their lives.

So part of the voice of a good blog is its personal nature—but don't a lot of corporate blogs tend to stifle that personal voice?

That's one of the big conundrums, and I've been thinking about this as somebody who has worked for a newspaper. If you're a reporter, you don't ever reveal your political biases; you don't show up for marches, or demonstrations, or anything like that. But with blogging, people reveal a lot more about their personal lives.

As newspapers and organizations compete with blogs, they will confront this more and more. Their bloggers are actually representing a whole organization, not just themselves—but they want to compete with the voice and the sort of snarkiness and the kind of energy that you find with blogs.

An interesting case in point is one of the first blogs that the Times had, The Carpetbagger by David Carr. He recently came out with a memoir about his drug addiction. Having a Times reporter who's kind of out there, both with his blog and with his memoir, talking about his personal life . . . It's not like Times people have never written memoirs before, but to have one where he talks about endangering the lives of his kids and cocaine addiction—I can't think of a memoir that a Times person has written like that before. And I think part of the change has to do with blogs.

Little by little, things that were distinctly “bloggy” are beginning to creep in—even in some of the institutional blogs. But I don't know how you keep the tone and yet keep the reins on it. It will be very interesting to see how it all sorts out.

Are there any other interesting questions or challenges you expect to see play out for more institutional blogs as they get off the ground?

One thing that's hard to translate into print form is the “linkiness” of blogs. It used to be that newspapers would keep things internal; their links would be only to the same newspaper's stories. But now news organizations and magazines are feeling the pressure to include links from outside sources and things that other people are talking about, which means that they're in danger of losing their reader's attention—or that rather than coming back to, say, the New York Times site, they would go to yet another blog.

Timeliness is also a big challenge—the blog topics of today seem like “who cares?” next week. How do you get that fresh feel without having people say, “Why am I reading this three-week-old story today?” That was certainly a challenge for me in finding things for the book that would still be of interest to people when the book came out, and I think I did, but I don't think it's typical of most blogs that they remain interesting forever. I think they have a shorter shelf life than most news pieces.

One thing association publications have going for them is that you're speaking to a slice of the population, and that's something that blogging does very well—finding a local group and linking people into other groups that have similar interests. That aspect of blogging works very well for association publishing.

In your book, you focus on the writing of the bloggers themselves. But one thing that gets emphasized when you read about the importance of blogs is the two-way communication, the relationship between the commenters and the blogger. Do you have any thoughts on that?

I have heard a lot of people complaining that a blog becomes just a trash can for people to say whatever they feel. It's not like letter writers, where they have to think things out, and get a stamp, and think, “Do I really want to send this?” It's a more impulsive medium where people are apt to become extremely hotheaded—especially if they don't think that it can be traced to them. A lot of newspapers feel that they don't have it under control, and that it's the really crazy people who end up writing in.

Just by registering, people are more apt to control what they say, if they think that it can be traced to them—like if you register for a newspaper's site, and then you comment on it, people tend to be more tempered that way.

But for an association, it would be a good thing to allow postings that are critical of the organization as long as they're not nasty or ad hominem attacks. One good thing about blogging is the democratic aspect. If you register the people who are leaving comments, they tend to be just a little more measured in what they say. But banning all criticism or editing so that only the nice comments end up coming through—that's a mistake. It's a tricky thing, but it's probably an important characteristic for an association blog to have.

For those who may not be reading blogs now, do you have any recommendations about how to understand blogs and bloggers a little bit better?

There is no substitute for just jumping in. My book is a good sampling, and if you find something that you like in the book, I would go to that website and then go to the sites that they link to, or their favorite sites. Or, do a Google search—they have a blog search function where you can take a topic that you're interested in and see what the top blogs are on that subject.

There's also Technorati—a website where you can look at the top 100 sites and or search by topic. If you're interested in following boxing or modern dance or whatever, then you would narrow your search and start reading on the topics that most interest you. You could put in any two search terms, and there's probably a blog on it. For example, one of the political bloggers in my book, Matthew Yglesias, also writes about college basketball. Just about every combination of interests that you can imagine will be out there, somewhere.

But it does require a lot of just poking around and seeing what's out there. People are very hesitant to get in, but once they get in, then the danger becomes that there's no end to how much you can explore. It just goes on and on—which doesn't mean it's not rewarding, it's just very time consuming and absorbing, and it is its own world. You just have to jump in and see what appeals to you.

Lisa Junker is editor-in-chief of Associations Now. This story first appeared in Association Publishing magazine, the official publication of the Society of National Association Publications (SNAP) and is reprinted with permission.