Just take a few moments...

As I've mentioned before, and will probably not mention again in the future, this blog was conceived to fulfill a classroom requirement. Tomorrow our professor will go through each blog and grade it based on content and creativity, among other things. One of those other things is basic stuff like spelling and grammer.

So we were allowed to go through this week and clean up our article, which brings me to a little lesson bloggers, professional journalists and other writers could all learn. But especially to bloggers, when you crank out a thousand words really quick and without thinking hit the "Publish Post" button.

As I went through to clean up my articles, I was astounded by the spelling errors, the sentence structures and the length of my articles. As I waxed poetic on the state of blogging and wikis, I wrote lengthy posts which could have been shortened without any loss of content.

Imagine for just one moment how your article would look if you took five minutes to step back and look over it? What if you saved it and came back to it later to revise before posting?

Here's the money question though. What if you took one hour to research what you were writing? What if, rather than merely comment on the news, which is something bloggers and professionals both do, you took one hour of your time to look online, flip through a book or, even better, make a phone call?

That's my challenge to bloggers everywhere, including myself. When that issue hits you and you just can't wait to get online and post your thoughts, just take one brief moment and think of one thing you can do to make your article that much more interesting, credible and informed. How much better can it be in 15 minutes? And if it can be better then, what about an hour? C'mon people. You can miss Oprah for just one day to write a kick ass blog can't you?

Intertainment...

I spent the weekend with my family because my brother graduated from the University of I'm-not-going-to-tell-you-because-I'm-a-Duck. And as we talked, laughed and shared, we took a break to share some of our favorite amusements.

They weren't TV shows. They weren't videos, CD's or anything. For a good thirty minutes five of us huddled around a laptop and showed each other the amusing online videos and other oddities that we like to watch. And there was an interesting pattern that emerged. As we shared cool websites and programs that tickled our funny reflex, I noticed that by and large these were written and produced by non-professionals.

I'm amazed constantly about how the internet and current technology has allowed us to create and publish works on our own. It has maximized the amount of creative output and allowed individual people to participate in the process of creation and production. No longer to the big execs get to decide what is funny and what isn't.

So I wanted to share a few things that entertain me quite a bit, but are produced by little more than a few people and a computer. Ah the power of the internet!

Happy Mother's Day: Two students from Gonzaga studying film and production make amusing videos in their spare time. This one tells the hilariously-violent tale of two brothers just trying to take a photo of themselves to send to their mother. As someone who had three brothers, this rings true and hilarious. They went from being a couple locally known Gonzaga University students to being internet celebrities that got over one million hits for this video.

The Lonely Island: Here's a rags to riches tale for you. Three guys try, and fail, at producing a show called "Awesometown." They pitch it to Fox, MTV and Comedy Central, each of which turn it down. They continue to work hard and post all of their videos online, including a fake teen drama set in Malibu called The 'Bu and in the process become regular guests on "Saturday Night Live." They went from recording little sketches like this one and this one to appearing on "Saturday Night Live" with this ridiculously hilarious video.

Cute Overload: I challenge you to dislike this website. It's a blog style site in which readers contribute photos of animals that are cute beyond belief. And I swear to god, these animals are cute. Everything from a pug with a cast on one leg to a turtle the size of a DIME!!!!!.

These contribute little to the news media, but they are entertaining, quality pieces of work, put together by regular joes and done with little more than a computer. It may not expose a scandal, but it's a nice amusement during your coffee break.

Let's not forget why we're in this...

Here's my favorite paragraph from an column called "How To Get Ahead in the New Media Newsroom, Circa 2006" by Steve Outing:

What seems to be becoming the norm in newsrooms these days is that a growing group of reporters, photographers and editors are now working in jobs where there's a wide variety of tasks to be done each day: feeding the newspaper's Web site; writing for blogs and interacting with blog readers; gathering audio for the website and/or radio partners; recording video clips; participating in online chats and discussion forums ... Oh, and writing for the newspaper's print edition.

I'll be the first person to stand up and advocate for journalists stepping up to the technological bat and taking a swing at some new media device that they hadn't before. I always commend the old school for either trying, or letting someone else try their hands at blogging, filming, audio recording or anything along those line. New technology, to put it bluntly, freaking rules! I love it to death, but as I sat down to read this Sunday's newspaper from a nearby but here unnamed metropolis, I couldn't help but balk over a few lackluster articles that left me with far too many questions.

I was impressed at first that the newspaper had taken on a little more daring and modern front page design on the major story. The front page boasted not one, not two but six photos related to the story, each numbered with a corresponding extended caption on the side. Again I say, kudos. I love seeing this kind of thinking outside the box both online and in print. But as I skimmed through the A section, new ideas aside I kept running into articles that did not cover enough of the story.

I shouldn't end the story wondering why in a 20 inch article covering a controversial local issue that the reporter only quoted one source. I shouldn't start a story thinking to myself, "That lead just doesn't make any sense."

I'm not trying to be snobby. I'm willing to accept that there are good days and bad days at the paper. But it highlighted one thing for me that's important. All the thinking-outside-the-box in the world can't replace good reporting. Outing ends his quote above saying "...oh, and writing for the newspaper's print edition."

It's a joke, but I think this makes an important point that we shouldn't forget our first priority as we add all the fancy bells and whistles to our news. Outing lists a number of good journalists, such as Frank Cerabino and Leslie Streeter, but they didn't get where they are now by writing a cool blog.

Over here at the University of Oregon we have it beaten into our head regularly that nothing replaces good hit-the-ground-running reporting. Have a computer, crunch numbers in Excell, blog, record, post and wiki your heart out, but make it worth reading first. Bells and whistles don't replace good content.

Blogga blogga blogga!

Okay, so maybe I’m not Kurt Vonnegut, but that doesn’t mean I can’t spout off about whatever I want! I’ll spout and create a personality driven blog whether Ken Sands says I can or not!

Okay, that’s not true at all, and he makes a pretty decent point in his article It can be tough to train journalists how to be bloggers when he says that people can’t just get the web space and write whatever they want.

A quick stop by Movies and More at the Spokesman-Review site to see what a really well done blog looks like. It’s focused, it’s clear, it’s entertaining and it’s interesting.

I hope that I can provide just such a blog myself. For a moment, I wondered if my generation has an advantage over older writers because we’ve grown up with the Internet and evolved write along side technology.

Then I remembered Live Journal. This is where I believe the false notion that a blog can be about whatever is on your mind at the time came from.

Let me put a big disclaimer right here. In no way am I saying anything against the Live Journal community, or the use a blogs to relate personal and anecdotal information to mainly friends and loved ones. I keep up with a handful of friends through their blogs, and in fact the conversation therein has evolved to the point that I more often send notes through their postings than I do to their actual e-mail address.

However because these types of blogs really took off much faster than blogs put up by journalists for a specific purpose, somehow professional journalists thought they could just write about whatever, turning themselves into their own Dave Barry with millions of fans.

Unfortunately there’s already one Dave Barry, and if we’ve learned anything from blogs it’s that although you may be famous for 15 minutes through this medium, it may be only to 15 people.

No, Sands points out, and rightly so, that for a blog to succeed, it must have a point. That’s what brings people back to it each and every day.

I learned this with my first blog Discord/Harmony. What started out as random ranting over various issues quickly turned into a posting place for my radio show at KWVA, Eugene. As time went on I realized that there was no room on this blog for anything else. It had become what it had become. It’s introduced me to some great people, and opened up some new ideas and connections.

I may not have the spot to air out my personal feelings about the moron that cut me off on the freeway, but in a journalistic sense it’s quite fulfilling to have a task oriented and goal directed project to keep my neurons sharp.