Our Independent Media class had the opportunity to learn from Mark Finkelstein, a nationally acclaimed conservative blogger for Newsbusters. He highlighted his strengths and weaknesses in being a blogger and what it takes for a blog to thrive, and sometimes well, fail.
But lets just focus on the strengths:
What he made evident was the importance of creating an Internet footprint, which is something our professors always entrench in our heads as well. Get your stuff out there, if you’re proud of it, put it on the Internet. You are your own brand and it is important to advertise your work where others will notice.
What makes his blog so strong is his use of short, concise blog posts that are up usually a couple hours after the event he is analyzing happened. It is important to enhance the speed at which you are working as a blogger because it brings more traffic to your site from your readers and from others who have linked to your work.
It was interesting how he noted the difference between newspapers and blogs. Blogging has started a movement in a way. When you are the first to blog on a current issue, other bloggers will link to you, making your perspective on the issue prevalent in order to further the cause. This is virtually unheard of in the newspaper world, where friendly competition is non-existent.
One other point I found interesting is that he doesn’t exhaust the subject he is writing about. This causes readers to become more passionate about it and allows them to engage themselves in it more by commenting and providing feedback. It creates a bond between your readers, which helps heighten your appeal.
And lastly, accuracy, accuracy, accuracy! You don’t want to be lampooning someone on something and have spelling errors or wrong information. This will only undermine your point and turn the lampooning around on you!
I think Finkelstein gave us some crucial information that will help make us better bloggers, and I will keep that in mind for the next five weeks.
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