Opinions: Publish, Then Be Damned

Dan forwarded me a video recently that raised an interesting point about the struggle that journalists have transitioning to blogging. The chap managed to summarise what was needed in a single sentence - “Just hit publish and let the comments correct you.”

Generally speaking – I very rarely do this. I write something on my netbook and then it goes through a few drafts and I almost always sleep on it. I treat my blog posts like I would treat a column, or a fully fledged article. The problem with this is that people want regular blog posts and they don't pay the same rates as a full article, so it becomes stressful and certainly doesn't offer value for money.

I think most journalists see see blogs as merely another way of formatting content – something we discussed in the blogger/journalist thread. The reality is that blogs and columns are not the same. I think blogs need to be more off the cuff and don't even necessarily have to come to a conclusion.

If you write regularly enough, the content should flow fairly easily from head to screen with little or no SPAG corrections required – so a cursory glance is all that is needed before simply pushing that big submit button.

I can spend hours working on a piece and it still won't be perfect – it's just impossible to do. Someone out there will always pick it apart. I had a column on The Inquirer back in 2003 and I got a lot of good feedback from my posts (I think most of it has been lost in the transition to VNU). Every column I wrote was read by a huge number of people and my inbox would be full of responses, both good and bad. No matter how long I worked on it – there was always something I would miss. You can't please everybody all the time, and the greater the audience – the higher the chance you're going to find someone who isn't pleased.

Letting the comments correct you is important on two levels. You can respond to the comments, or even update the original article – solving the problem of being wrong. With my Inquirer column, there was no option to leave a comment so I'd end up with a lot of similar e-mails in my Inbox, and a I sent out a lot of individual responses to the readers. I imagine the situation would be very different now.

The more correct you are – the less likely you are to get engagement from your readers. If you look around, most of the comments left are people disagreeing with the writer. By allowing for mistakes, you actually increase your chance of engagement with your audience.

Let's also not forget that a column – or a blog post, in almost all cases is an opinion and purely that. There is no right or wrong answer (unless there are factual issues).

Some of you might have noticed that Dan and I have started blogging for The Telegraph. The concept of publishing off the cuff, like most bloggers do, is something I'll openly admit I'm struggling to adjust to. Thanks to Dan, I think my outlook on this has somewhat changed.

Now – a quick glance at my SPAG and I'll let you correct everything else for me

The two styles of writing are quite easy to get confused over. I've always been scared about posting to my personal blog because that's the web address I put on business cards, and as a result I've been putting "less serious" posts on a Tumblr blog. Now that has started working against me because I prefer the short, sharp posting style to Tumblr and I love the (mostly) engaging and amusing content that comes out of the community and sits waiting to be re-blogged. My personal blog must feel neglected.

Being wrong all the time is bad and I don't think that building yourself as that person everyone loves to hate is the way to go. A good reputation comes from having a slightly different perspective that adds something to the conversation and the intelligence to piece together evidence to back it up. Milo summed up blogging beautifully by describing it as a three step process - observation, evidence, joke.

The Telegraph is giving me a taste of having my SPAG torn to shreds, and I welcome the thickness that it is slowly adding to my skin, but that is provided the useful contributions to my chosen topics are also amongst the replies. Perhaps some XKCD is needed to illustrate all this:

Well said Spode... I guess the blog post is a way of starting a conversation by telling everyone what you think. And - unless it's a life-changing conversation - I don't rehearse what I am about to say to the last detail.

As far as business opinion is concerned, I am open to being challenged, have been proved wrong from time-to-time and also been know to change my mind on something during a debate. Why should a written blog conversation be any different.

That has happened to me as well!