Peter Clifton, editor of the BBC News website, has started writing commentaries that "looks back at the week in the newsroom - and tackles some of your questions."
I've seen a couple of blog posts about this, which talk about it as blogging. Well, by any stretch of the imagination,
Peter replies:
Well it seemed like a good idea at the time... I thought it would be interesting to kick around a few of the things we were up to, but I could be wrong. What do you think?
Peter, it's a very good idea! It's a great initiative, reaching out in this way to visitors to BBC News. It adds a human face to what can seem a faceless corporation and gives some insight into the people behind the news.
But why not do it properly and give your section the attributes that would make it a far more realistic interactive experience between you and site visitors and enable you to develop some actual relationships with those visitors? Make it like a real blog!
For instance, why not enable commenting directly with each of your commentaries, rather than filling out the email form at the bottom of the page? You can still have a comment monitoring system in place so you can weed out those that you, or whoever polices the comments, decide not to publish.
What about an RSS feed for your section so that we can see what you write as soon as you publish it? That would help drive visitors to your section than otherwise would be the case where you have to manually keep returning to it to see if there's anything new. You have RSS feeds elsewhere on the site - why not for your section?
Take a look at the new see what's going on in France with newspapers like Ventura County Star in the US is Pat Loughrey advocated this week.
Neville Hobson is the author of the popular Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson's blog:
Found an error or have a suggestion? Let us know and we'll review it.
Suggest a Correction
BBC News Editor Starts Some Conversations, But It Isn't Blogging
0 views
Comments (0)
Please sign in to leave a comment.
No comments yet. Be the first to comment!