Blogs -- Blogging 101

There is a misconception that blogs have to be snarky and/or opinionated. That's not so, in the same way that a newspaper doesn't have to be borderline libelous just because the National Enquirer is.

Instead, how news blogs differ from news stories is primarily in tone and presentation.

Regarding the former, a news blog is written more conversationally, whereas a news story is written authoritatively. A blog sounds like a conversation. It's okay to use woulda and shoulda and coulda and even first-person references. It sounds like a conversation a reporter is having with someone while they're putting together a story, or after a story has been written and that reporter is filling in his friends at the Peanut Barrel.

In presentation, a traditional news story is offered in one shot, offering a summation and history of what happened. Blogs, on the other hand, are a stream of news, spread out over various posts. You have have posts with one side, another side and then a neutral expert's take. Or it may be a blow-by-blow, with a new post picking up where the last one left off.

Otherwise, there are many similarities between news blogging and news writing, even if the approaches to similar ends are different.

Yes, a news blog is conversational. But a blog for news is not personal; it still has to be on a topic that is relevant, interesting and/or useful to your readers. It's your voice; not your opinion.

A news blog is focused. Like a sharp lede in a story, you should get to the point.

A news blog is short. A good post is 100 or 200 words long. But that's because you can file a single post for a single facet of a story, with other facets getting their own posts. In a news story, we put all those facets together into a single report. In blogging, the blog itself is the single entity; posts simply tell the latest installment of an ongoing story.

In news stories, we offer evidence by putting facts and background into a story. In blogging, we offer such evidence and background not in text but by hyperlink.

Hyperlinks are links from a text section of your blog to another Web site, usually one that is directly related to the text section in question. We can usually spot hyperlinks by noticing an area that appears highlighted, like here.

For example, let's say you're doing a story about me. Maybe you set up a hyperlink from a highlighted section of my name in a blog to my Facebook page. Or my LinkedIn page. Or maybe you're talking about how awesome I am, and in that section you hyperlink to an online article about me winning a crapload of awards.

Just like in print, it's a way to not just tell readers, but to show them. In print, we show and tell in the same dimension. But in a blog, we leverage that medium's strength and make backgrounding multidimensional.

Now, how do you create a hyperlink? Easy.

First, you highlight the section of text for which you want to create a hyperlink. Then, you click on the symbol on your blog or email account that looks like a globe with a chain link over it. That's the hyperlink key.

When you click on that key, you'll be asked to paste in a URL, which is a fancy acronym for a Web address. That should be the URL for whatever you want to be the hyperlink destination.

You paste that in, hit OK (or whatever the concluding key is), and voila! Hyperlink city, baby!

For this class, I will be asking you do do some news blogs. For each assignment, I will be asking you to do two blog posts, with a minimum of two hyperlinks per post, on a single news topic.

I think you may be able to get a sense of how you can turn a news story into a blog by looking at this Gawker.com blog post based on a news story you have have heard about on your own: Michigan's ban on energy drink/alcohol mixes. Oh, and whaddya know, this blog links to -- and even credits -- The State News!

Take a look at the blog and its style and how it presents information, and then look at the State News story and its presentation method. See similarities? Differences? How alike goals are accomplished in differing ways? And see how helpful hyperlinking is to provide background without cluttering the blog or breaking its conversational tone?