Having a strong set of blogs on a media website is essential these days for being a successful one. It’s ticking those boxes of the ‘converged newsroom’ when you’ve got your reporters blogging alongside the stories they are producing – using their blogs as a way to expand on their areas of expertise. It’s also a good way of a reporter expanding on area they are passionate about.

There are numerous types of different software out there – from in-house solutions to Moveable Type – and each one has its advantages/disadvantages. Some of the biggest barriers I’ve found in discussing blogging with reporters are:

• finding the blogging software clunky to use, which puts them off because they think it’s going to take ages
• they still want to write 300-400 words when sometimes just 50 will do

I’ve recently been experimenting with Tumblr as a blogging platform. I love this blog (the one you’re reading now) and using the hosted wordpress solution – but I wanted a place to expand on my thoughts and inspired by the ever excellent Dave Lee I saw Tumblr as a way of doing that.

I wanted to keep this blog about journalism and communications but have a ‘dumping ground’ for interesting things that caught my eye, things I experienced and wanted to share. I didn’t want to mix the two.

Twitter is a good way of sharing, but sometimes you need more than 140 characters to fully get your point across.

Tumblr is perfect. Its interface is quick and easy to use – want to post a photo? Just hit the photo button. You don’t even need to have your own image, just shove a URL in from Flickr and it’ll scrape a photo to go on (just make sure you provide a click-through link to avoid rights issues). Same with videos. Same with just a link.

I like the way it’s easy to customise your layout, colour scheme and give your blog a more personal feel – while still not making it inaccessible and hard to read.

So, in busy newsrooms across the country, if Tumblr was installed as the blogging engine would we see better responses and take up? I believe so, especially on the features desks. Think about how many bands, clothes, styles, tid-bits come across the desks of feature writers in regional papers. Want a dumping ground to share your highlights? Tumblr would be perfect. That cool new band you heard the other night, a quick link to their Myspace and your content creation is done.

As John Rostron, who runs the Swn Festival in Cardiff, said to me once: “I always used to pick up the Echo, once my parents had finished with it, to find out about local bands.” Well, with less people’s parents taking a local paper, we need to make sure we can still offer the place to signpost people to what’s good in their local area.

Tumblr also has the social networking element of being able to follow someone, like a post etc. My biggest criticism of Tumblr is that it doesn’t seem to allow comments on posts? Update: You can add comments, as pointed out below in the comments on this post, by integrating DisQus. Just register with DisQus, add your site, and away you go.

Image credit to buyalex

What’s your experience with Tumblr as a blogging tool? Do you use it? Did you use it and not like it? Let me know in the comments below

At the Talk About Local Unconference there was a lot of talk about creating a network of hyperlocal blogs. Talk About Local are doing a superb job of getting people started in blogging for their local community – but what about those people already underway or who have bigger aspirations?

I have learned through working on Blog Preston since January 2009 that there is a real thirst for community content about the place where you live. The local media is fixated on scandal, car crashes and the like and misses the community content. There is a real space and it needs to be filled.

The Talk About Local Unconference has convinced me that Blog Local can work. Our idea is to create a network of local blogs, some of them will be created under the ‘Blog [insert location]‘ brand and we will support these centrally with technical help and guidance on creating good and interesting community content. Others will be established blogs that are already happy with their technical stuff and their content, but would like to opt in to a wider network of local blogs.

We would use the powerful WordPress Multi-user platform to create this network, and be able to create powerful plug-ins for local blogs that deliver relevant local information. One thing we’ve learned from the failure of local media groups at trying to fit standard templates is that it doesn’t work, Blackpool is different to Preston, Preston is different to Harrogate and Harrogate is different to Southampton. Each of them has a different audience the the website for the ‘Blog [insert location]‘ site needs to reflect that and it also needs to take into account the skills of the person updating it. If they are better with a camera than they are with words, it needs to be more of a photojournalism blog. If they can’t take a good picture to save their life, it’s more of a wordy affair but with a design that compensates for this and keeps it interesting.

One of the struggles for anyone running a local blog is content. Not everyone who starts or wants to start up a community blog is a recent journalism graduate or unemployed graduate. They don’t have the legal training, they don’t know how to knock out 250 words into 10 minutes and they don’t often know where to look for stories. Often local blogs wither and die after a few months when they think there’s nothing left to write about. Wrong. There is always information, events, opinion, gossip, news, photos, in your local area – you just need to build a network and tap into it. Blog Local will support its network to do this and to keep producing good content.

Add to this that Blog Local is not-for-profit, so the content is driven by the community and not by shareholders and it creates an interesting concept. Taking the new technology and tools available to create a mix-mash of community blogs across the UK, producing local content and information.

Is there a business model in this? I’m not 100 per cent sure yet but I do know that over the next few months we’re going to be working with some very exciting new people to help create a network of local and community blogs that can help lift the lid on their local communities.

Image credit to Aishihik

Had to ditch the footer though, as it wasn’t working with the widgets for some reason. You can see what it should have looked like. I think I’ll just create a new footer to match the new stylesheet when it’s done.

Haven’t done this level of design/coding for over a year since finishing my degree, so it’s good to get back into it.