My employer, Recordnet.com, recently moved its blogs to a WordPress platform, which gave me a chance to re-examine the art of blogging for newspaper sites. Here are seven tips for print reporters-turned-bloggers that are based on some of the best and worst features of newspaper blogs.
1. Understand that a blog post is not an article. Newspaper reporters are comfortable writing inverted pyramid stories for print, and as a result some are tempted to apply the same structure to their blog posts.
It’s a mistake on par with writing a newspaper article in the format of a television news script.
The Internet is a distinct medium with a distinct market of consumers who come to blogs looking for something different than what they can find in print. If you try and give them print articles, they’ll simply go somewhere else for content, leaving you without an audience.
ShareThis is a neat tool. It allows visitors to your blog to easily share your posts over a variety of networks, including Twitter and Facebook.
It’s also pretty easy to install for novice WordPress developers like myself. First install the ShareThis plugin, then get the code for a button from ShareThis.com. Paste the code into the configuration page for the plugin, and you’re good to go.
It gets a little trickier if you want to move the location of the button in your blog layout. When the plugin is first installed the button appears at the bottom of your blog posts, and there seems to be little information available on how to move it. This morning I searched Google for “Moving the Share This button in WordPress” and the best result I received was this unanswered forum question.
After playing with the plugin a bit I figured it out. Here’s what you need to do:
My latest Flash creation is up and running; I’ll link it to ianhillmedia.com once my “client” has a chance to check it out.
All I wanted to do was make a line grow in Flash CS3.
