Just came from a wonderful presentation by Sree Sreenivasan, dean of students at Columbia University's journalism school, on the topic of blogging, Internet tools, etc. If you ever get the chance to sit in on one of his sessions, do it. Sree is bright, enthusiastic, pleasant, informative and witty. One of the points he made to an audience of editors, researchers, librarians and reporters is that, yes, lots of blogs are a waste of time, but be smart and find the useful ones. Separate the wheat from the chaff. And don't be afraid of them. Use them as sources, just as if they were callers to the newsroom trying to tell us something. Seems pretty obvious to me. Sree has led the way in teaching journalists how to understand technology in its many forms.
I asked him about how newspapers ought to handle corrections or misrepresentations of their stories, specifically, what to do when a newspaper makes an error which is then amplified on the blogosphere. The NYTimes had exactly that situation occur recently when a reporter incorrectly wrote that Hillary Clinton had criticized Democrats when she had actually knocked the Republican leadership in Congress. That incorrect story then zoomed around the blogs for more than a day, before the Times corrected it. Sree's answer was that newspapers will have to confront the errors or misrepresentations, not simply ignore them, and, as he said earlier in his presentation, newspapers can no longer simply stand on their reputation.
Sree also showed two blogs that all copy editors should know about:
Bill Walsh's Blogslot and RegretTheError.com.
Good advice all the way around.
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