Do you have a background in journalism? Are you trying to tackle the world of blogging and social media? I work with folks who come from that background and some of them find the personal approach that blogging, media, social networking and journalism a bit difficult to adjust to. Now, I’m not going to try to tackle the entire state of journalism in the twenty-first century in a blog post, but I am going to focus on blogs and how they can be different from the journalism you learned in school. Or practiced when writing for that newspaper.
Blogs can be personal. They can be subjective. In fact, blogs often gain more readership when writers are personal and actually present their opinions on things. Now, it’s not just about opinions. It’s about creating that personal connection with the reader and that often means opening up the door, or at least a window, into your own personal space. Readers don’t just want to know what you think about a topic. They want to know who you are and then what you think about the topic. It really is about making a connection.
So, what do you do? Well, yes, the rule of journalism as far as researching your subject still hold. After all, you need to know about the subject you’re forming an opinion on. But when you right about the story, you’re actually allowed not just to present the facts, but what you think about the facts. And then you can go further and even talk about how the facts affect you and your family. You can open up and be a real person in the blog. Because we like to connect with real people.