The Foothill Cities blog had a post back when in December about the state of journalism blogs. It was written by an anonymous Southern California newspaper employee who tried to explore the reasons why journalists aren't generally good bloggers.
The post identified three reasons for the lack of better journalistic blogging:
- They don't promote their own content. In other words, they are not doing a good job of networking to get more clicks on their sites.
- They don't know what the reading public wants. In the FC writer's view, this means giving readers some additional insight into their newspaper's coverage of the scene rather than random observations by the aspiring blogger.
- They don't need to be successful - the journalist gets compensated the same whether one person reads his/her blog or no one reads.
We're not sure about the FC writer's criteria for blogging success, but there are a few local journalistic blogs we think are worth following.
The David Allen blog is always good finding interesting tidbits about the Inland Empire. Whether it's a place to eat, an interesting issue before a local city council, a cultural event, or a good read, Allen covers it with wit and manages to keep the subjects separate from his Daily Bulletin column for the most part. Maybe, as the FC writer's post noted, it is easier for a columnist to blog than for a regular news reporter since the columnist's work generally involves the sort of personal observations that lend themselves to blogging.
Tony Krickl's Courier City Beat is also a fairly decent local news blog. We like it because Krickl blogs about some of the story bits that don't make it into his Claremont Courier stories. His post on the 10th anniversary of the Landrum shooting strikes us as a good example of the sort of additional information that gives some nuance to a news piece.
We also follow former Courier reporter Gary Scott's blog, not so much for the local news as for Scott's observations about the state of journalism, local and otherwise. If you want to witness the unravelling of the print news industry, Scott's posts are an excellent place to start.
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