An academic year later, and it doesn’t look as if anything’s changed. In a comment on my post about blogging assignments Mindy McAdams wrote:

[I]f they treat it as a class assignment… they will never understand blogging, will they?

I have taken it for granted that assigning students to create and keep a blog is the best way to get them to under tand blogging. But maybe there is a better way.

I’ve got no idea whether any of the staff at Lincoln read that post, but I doubt it. Here’s what the “Journalism Skills” unit handbook for first-year Lincoln journalism students says on blogging:

***Blogging — You will be required to produce a blog with at least six entries. You will receive instructions on these requirements in the lecture devoted to blogging by Bernie Russell in week four (February 17). The blog will be handed in by 4pm on Thursday April 15 (Week 10). You will hand in a copy of the blog address (the URL) on an A4 sheet of paper, which also also contains your name and student number, YOU WILL ALSO email the blog address and your name and student number to Bernie Russell and Roger De Bank by 4pm on Thursday April 15 (Week 10). This represents 15% of your Semester B marks. [Their emphases.]

The comment I made about the requirements for last year’s first-year students still applies: “That isn’t blogging as self-motivated publishing. That’s work.”

I’d be very interested to hear what Bernie says in his February 17th lecture, but I’m not especially hopeful he’ll fill students with a passion for blogging.

In my retrospective of how the first topic went, I was very pessimistic about the chances of increasing involvement, and dismissed it as yet another case of my 90/10 rule on student effort.¹

Just a small town girl

After I posted, Andy Hickley emailed me some comments. Andy has given me permission to reprint his thoughts here, and I think they’re illuminating about why LSJ bloggers is in the state it is, and what could be done to improve things.

Whilst having a blog ring is very simple and easy, i think it’s basically the subject of it that led many people to completely ignore writing up an article – i don’t know how relevant hyperlocal journalism is in the world, but it’s not a phrase i’ve ever heard uttered before.

Naturally a lot of people just aren’t gonna be interested in writing or reading a blog about something they don’t care so much about. Maybe we should start with softer topics at the beginning of the LSJ phenomenon that slowly work their way up to harder views? Thus my suggestion for the next one would be about what people’s plans and dream jobs are after graduation – whilst hardly groundbreaking, it’d at least be readable and help the general public to find out more about the individual bloggers personalities, which might help them come back when we talk about something a little over their heads?

Also whilst i’m slowly growing more to love Twitter, i’m fairly certain that journalism students who use it are in the minority, maybe getting some Facebook updates (even if it’s just a status or something from you), or asking Sam Pidioux to email round updates and reminders to contribute like she did when the thing got created, might get some attention and contributions?

Just a city boy

I think Andy’s views are far closer to those of the “average” journalism student than anything I, or Shane, or Daniel, or Josh might write.

i don’t know how relevant hyperlocal journalism is in the world, but it’s not a phrase i’ve ever heard uttered before.

This example is incredibly revealing. Andy isn’t thick by any means, but hyperlocal is a “big thing” in the media world right now, to the point where my natural instinct is not to link to any sources because I assume that the people reading this already know about it.

What needs to be considered is that a lot of the things I take for granted don’t figure for most of the students on the journalism course at Lincoln (and perhaps a majority across the UK). The people who know about this stuff, and read and write about it, and use Twitter (etc.), as Andy points out, are in the minority.

But to the people in this minority it all seems very natural and ordinary — “You’re not on Twitter? Really?” — and I think this also carries over into blogging. With regards to potential topics for LSJ bloggers, I subconsciously assumed that people who had a blog would be “in the know” when it came to the prevailing discussions of the future of journalism — hyperlocal being an example.

It’s a census year

So now we have two distinct groups which I’m going to define as “those who know”, and “those that don’t”, at the risk of sounding condescending.

What really excited me about LSJ bloggers when I was setting it up was that it could be an unparalleled venue for discussing the future of journalism, and other major issues facing the trade — it would look at national and international trends in journalism with the ability to apply them to a shared, local situation. It could easily combine lofty theory and on-the-ground practice.

I hope this explains why I wanted it to be a place where we could easily discuss things such as hyperlocal journalism, because we could take the theory, and think about how we could apply it — the city of Lincoln would provide a common foundation and testing ground for a variety of ideas.

But this assumes that the people taking part in the discussion are part of the first group — “those who know”. Unfortunately the majority of journalism students aren’t in that category, at least at Lincoln.²

Move to the suburbs?

That’s the situation. It may not be ideal, but it’s what we’ve got to work with. So how can we alter LSJ bloggers to draw more people in, and be more active once they are?

I think the most important thing is what topics we discuss. Implementation and notification are secondary issues — posting notifications on Facebook (etc.) is a secondary thing, whereas topic selection is fundamental.

I still completely reject the line of thought put forward by Darren Moss, because it ignores our constituency: journalism students at Lincoln.

We need lightweight journalism-related topics, it seems. That, combined with a different system of notification and advertising, may prove enough to get more journalism students involved. Topics should be interesting, journalism-related, but shouldn’t sound like the quantum physics of journalism. They should be things that people already have some kind of opinion on, so that it doesn’t seem like a lot of effort to develop and voice it.

It’s time to have a think. If things go well, LSJ bloggers may be relaunched for semester B.

But it lacks some stuff that WordPress does really well. With Tumblr your posts aren’t the focus — when you log into the Tumblr dashboard it shows you the posts from those you follow. It’s not particularly suited for use as a CMS, which is made clear when you see that it shows your posts as a big list. It’s geared towards publishing, publishing a lot, and seeing what other people are publishing.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. I don’t doubt that it got me blogging regularly, and even often, which is something that I just wasn’t doing before. In fact, I wrote a post about how effective Tumblr was in doing that.

It’s served me very well over the past few months, but how easily things could get “lost” in a mass of posts — particularly ones that you’d spent a long time working on — was really quite disturbing.

WordPress is the opposite, with many options for sorting, categorising, and finding content. This is one of the things that drove me to Tumblr, probably because I didn’t have many posts (and very few of good quality) and WordPress was constantly pointing it out.

While working on my deconstruction of Bullet Magazine’s website the importance of having a clear layout that made it very easy to find and archive content became very apparent. It’s the whole reason why their website is crap, and the whole reason why it needs to change.

And then I published.

I hated what resulted. At over 2,000 words, it was a perhaps unusually long post. Even so, my Tumblr site dealt with it very badly. When reading it you could get half-way down, and have the whole screen occupied by text with no navigation elements either side, except for the scroll bar.¹ Due to the styling, there wasn’t a huge amount of text per-screen either, so the overall effect was very disorientating. I was lost in my own copy.

This specific instance could have been dealt with by a change of theme, but it’s a good cameo for Tumblr’s problems more generally with being “lost in content”.

So I decided to take some of my own medicine, and decided to switch back to WordPress. I’m using the Basic Maths theme, which is nice and clean, with WordPress’s inherent advantage for keeping track of content, along with an awesome custom archives page.

I’m no longer pissing my posts into the abyss, they’re all neatly organised, and the navigation tools on the index pages provide the proper perspective to avoid feeling “lost” again.

That’s the main reason I changed back. I’m also glad to be back using a very flexible, powerful platform. I’ve also got comments enabled again, without having to use Disqus.²

Tumblr isn’t a bad system. It’s really not. It’s fantastic. But it’s just not what I’m looking for for my main site. I’ve still got it set up and I’m still going to post things to it, but “proper” blog posts that have taken time and effort will be published here.

I was far too optimistic for how many people would get involved. Quite a few (but still few) people emailed their blog addresses and/or followed @LSJbloggers on Twitter.

That did not translate into actually suggesting ideas or writing posts.

Only four people wrote posts, and they were either third-year students, or members of The Linc’s team (or both!). Three of the four are regular bloggers anyway: myself, Shane, and Daniel.

This is not encouraging in the least.

I was a bit concerned that people did not understand the concept. But I think the idea of a blog ring is so simple and relatively commonplace for this not to be a factor.

I was also dumbfounded when one of the two people who actually suggested a topic completely ignored LSJ bloggers’ constituency, and suggested something that had nothing to do with either Lincoln or journalism.

Jesus wept.

I did not help matters with my sloppy handling of the topic. I set no clear end date, and didn’t even respond myself until almost two weeks after it opened (and ten days after the previous post). Not helpful.

Technically, I have no complaints. The main aspect that I was a little worried about was the submission system. Apart from a stunning inability to read very simple written instructions, it worked well. The features for scheduling and managing posts are good enough for my needs.

Summary

It could have been handled much better on my end, and have been very clear about the timeframe for responses. I should have got my shit together, and kept everything very tight.

But I’m not sure what I can do, if anything, to boost the amount of people who got involved. The idea was to have it absolutely student-led and -controlled. The floor was completely open for topic suggestions. And yet it only attracted three, from two people.

My rule regarding journalism students’ effort and enthusiasm definitely applies to this: 10% will put some amount of effort in, whilst 90% are completely bone idle.

The longer, more detailed answer is that it does everything I need it to do.

Static pages are achieved by linking to a post. Ending posts with question marks allows for comments, though admittedly a limited version of them. One big thing was that it allows for submissions without having an account.

To submit a post to LSJ bloggers, all you need is to fill in your name and email address. No sign up. No account creation. That’s it.

And that’s pretty much it for the entire site. It’s all very simple and straightforward because that’s all it needs to be. At its core, LSJ bloggers is a very simple concept: we get together and decide what to discuss, and then we discuss it. The site is just there do host the discussion, and point people at students’ blogs.

It doesn’t need plugins, or social features, or stats, or categories, or Facebook integration, or ads.

It needs text, links, and an easy way to add them.

Tumblr does that, and it does it extremely well. It’s been about 24 hours since I created the blog on Tumblr and everything is set up, and for most of that time I wasn’t even working on it.

Oh, and it’s free. And all I needed to do to get it working with the domain name was change the A records. And, since it’s a hosted service, there was no need to upload and install anything to a server.

By Rob J Wells

Welcome to LSJ bloggers. I’ve set this site up to provide a place where journalism students at the University of Lincoln can get together and discuss topics to blog about, and to assemble a directory of students’ blogs.

The skeleton — this site — is in place, but the rest of how it’s going to work needs to be decided by the students who are going to take part.

The idea and implementation of LSJ bloggers owes a huge debt to Tomorrow’s News, Tomorrow’s Journalists over at Journalism.co.uk. TNTJ is a way for young journalists around the world to get together and debate the future of journalism.

LSJ bloggers is meant to be similar, but with a much tighter focus — students at Lincoln — and the topics will be whatever students want. The other main goal for the site is to “remove the futility of blogging”, and make blogging a worthwhile activity for students.

To make this work it needs the active support of students, but doesn’t require a lot of individual effort. All you have to do is say what you’d like to write about, talk it over with your peers, and then we’ll all go away and write about it.

If you have comments or questions, please either leave an answer at the end of this post, or email lsjbloggers@gmail.com.

You can read the initial proposal for LSJ bloggers here.

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Technical details

LSJ bloggers runs on Tumblr. This makes everything very simple and easy to use.

To submit posts, students can go to the submission page. The submission page is set up for link posts only. The idea is that students will post on their own blogs first, and then submit the link and either the full post or an excerpt of it.

If you have a Tumblr account, you can also become a member of LSJ bloggers, which will give you access to the site’s dashboard. If not, then there’s no real advantage to doing so — using the submission page is just as easy and straightforward.

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Any questions or comments?

The suggestion: get a Tumblr blog.

This idea kind of came out of having this blog, and also having Twitter. There was stuff that was too long or complicated for Twitter, and I didn’t want to put it here because it didn’t ‘fit’.

So I signed up (again) to Tumblr. It’s a mid-way point between Twitter and your real, got-an-about-page-and-tag-cloud-and-everything blog. You may be completely different in this respect, but there’s lots of stuff I want to post, comment on, link to, etc. My Tumblr-powered blog ((I’m using Tumblr as an example because it’s what I’ve been using. There may be other services out there. Whatever. Tumblr works. It’s quick and easy, and most importantly gets you posting.)) is now where I put that stuff.

And now it’s acting like Twitter does — great ideas are bubbling up that are a good fit for a ‘real’ blog.

“This is really cool/interesting/infuriating/bat-shit-fucking-loco, and I’ve got a lot to say about it. Is this really the thing I should be putting on a lightweight service? I think it deserves a proper post.”

Bang, more ideas.

When you get really comfortable with something, you generally want to keep doing it. I recently sent off a bunch of FoI requests, for the first time in months. The next day all I could think about was sending more off, finding out other interesting things, and what that might lead to.

There’s no reason your blog shouldn’t work in the same way.

It is incredibly important that I get feedback on this idea. If you have any thoughts or ideas at all I really want to hear them.

I wrote the skeleton of this post at the same time as my ode to Tumblr. Whereas that involved something new, this takes an old concept and applies it where it might make some difference.

Ladies and gentlemen, I propose a Lincoln student blog ring.

How sexy is that. Not very, right?

An explanation

Right now the problem seems to be that there was no real purpose or drive to many of the blogs set up by Lincoln journalism students ((By the way, if you know of any please could you send me the link – unless very few people were set the assignment, I probably don’t know about most of the blogs. Email me, send me an @reply on Twitter, leave a comment, whatever. I’d greatly appreciate it.)), other than to fulfil some arbitrary criteria. There are some exceptions to this but, as I wrote previously, not many.

One of the big things about blogging is meant to be community and conversation. “Meant to be” because I’m kind of sceptical about how important that element is, hence why in my earlier post about getting blogging again I simply stressed putting things on the internet in a new form (though they’re not necessarily new).

But this presupposes a familiarity and comfort level with blogging itself, a confidence in sharing ideas, and a belief that what you’re doing is, or could be, worthwhile. ((The definition of worthwhile is horrendously subjective. On this domain alone I use two meanings:

• Fun and/or interesting, and something that someone might value (the notebook); and,
• The product of consideration and effort, that might be conversation- and/or thought-provoking (the front page).

))

Creating something purely or even largely for academic assessment usually doesn’t create a strong attachment or feeling that it is worthwhile. (To you, and not just to your grades.)

A proposal

It’s quite simple: create a blog ring for Lincoln journalism students.

This would involve setting up a dedicated site ((Or the co-operation of an existing one, but I am not keen on that idea in the least.)). Having a single location where people can go for information and links to their peers would be incredibly valuable.

I believe this would help people feel that their efforts are not wasted, and would give them a reason to view blogging as worthwhile. It helps solve a big problem with the medium: that of “blogging into the abyss”.

I need to mention the university too: hopefully this will work well enough that whenever blogging is mentioned on the course this is also mentioned. The worst thing that could happen is that students don’t get involved. If they do, then they’re adding to the discussion. Hopefully it’ll be a lively one.

How it would work

A site would be set up, using WordPress. It would contain a list of all the students involved, and links to their blogs. It would feature news and announcements about the group, such as the month’s topic, and links to, or reposts of, responses to the topic.

It would also allow for discussion about the whole project.

This last point is crucial.

I may have suggested the idea, but it absolutely cannot be controlled by any one person or group of people. To work at all it requires the input and feedback of those it serves.

A request

This is just an idea right now. But I want this to happen as the benefits are too big to ignore.

I DESPERATELY NEED FEEDBACK AND COMMENTS ON THIS

I can’t stress that enough. And I want ideas from anyone and everyone.

Original WordPress comments:

Shane Croucher:

I like the idea and I’m definitely game for getting involved. The only thing is – are there enough of us who regularly update our blogs for this to happen? Or, even, are there enough of us who blog at all?

I agree that having something like what you’ve proposed would be the inspiration/encouraging factor for people to keep their blogs fresh. I think it would remove the futility of blogging for many of us.

I’m optimistic it could work and I think having a central point whereby we can see all of the updates, news etc would definitely improve hits/comments on each of the participants’ blogs.

Rob Wells:

I think there are enough people, and I’d be encouraging third-year journalism students (like myself), and others who are already relatively active, to pitch in and make it as vibrant as possible so we can get off to a quick start.

Elizabeth Fish:

I think this is a good idea! it would not only be good on a social level, but ideas for the individual could come out from what others are talking about.

The only problem is the counter of the above- idea stealing- and maybe being more reserved about the topics you write about, especially uni based topics. I guess that comes under idea stealing.

Overall though I like the idea, especially for those that take blogging and online journalism more seriously, and as Shane mentioned, make me more likely to update mine!

Shane Croucher:

Well it all sounds good to me, so keep me in the loop.

Daniel Ionescu:

A Lincoln student blog ring idea is great and as you said, quite easy to implement (and cheap). The only problem I can see so far is the number of Lincoln students actually blogging. We both know Rob that only a handful of students are actually blogging (separately from their course blogs) — as Shane politely mentioned.

But to add to your idea, perhaps a WordPress MU installation with BuddyPress would create a better platform that could encourage others to blog and socialise at the same time. Think about it: if freshers create a blog they can get connected to other like-minded colleagues (maybe based on theri uni email), and put their work out there also. If an arrangement with the university could make those blogs useful for their coursework as well, the better.

Rob Wells:

On the tech stuff:

Technical details can, and will, be worked out later. But we need to be extremely cautious about being too tech- and feature-heavy.

Whilst I can see the justification for things like BuddyPress, I don’t think they’re needed.

Adding extra features (and, therefore, extra complexity) would harm the main aim of providing a very simple service that encourages Lincoln journalism students to blog regularly.

We don’t need to provide a fully-featured social arena for people. They have other tools for that.

We just need to help give some meaning to students’ blogging.

On students blogging:

It’s true, there are very few students blogging. I only know of a few, but then again I only know of a few in total.

Those that currently blog fairly regularly will necessarily have to provide the ‘spark’ at the beginning, and hopefully we’ll manage to a) pull people in who did blog, but have stopped; and, b) retain those who start blogging as part of their course.

I think this latter part holds the most interest for me, because if we give a reason to keep blogging, away from the requirements of the course, then over time that will help strengthen the group.

Also, I think “[making] those blogs useful for their coursework as well” is kind of missing the point by approaching it from the wrong way. By setting blogging as coursework you’re just making it a task — I see this as a remedy for it being just work.

Liam Haynes:

This sounds like it can only be a good idea. While my blog and its aims/audience seem slightly removed from the general arena of your and other journalism students blogs, it would still be swell to be involved. Anything that kick starts or helps to maintain an exciting social media aspect in Lincoln is valuable.

Unfortunately I can’t really answer the main question, as I’ve never been “in love” with blogging. I certainly never felt the strong pull that some did ((*Cough*Dave*cough*)).

On with the tangent

One thing that looks like it isn’t helping young journalists getting truly interested ((This comes from, you must understand, a terribly researched and utterly non-scientific survey.)) is the inclusion of blogging in journalism school courses. For example take this selection of blogs from University of Lincoln journalism students:

The brown ones are blogs that haven’t been updated in 60 days. For some of the others, they’re only saved because of a recent post after months of neglect.

These are just the ones that I’ve put in my feed reader because I think it’s likely they’ll be updated again. From the original list I had, I’ve excluded ones that hadn’t been updated in 2009. (I’ve also excluded Bradley King‘s regularly updated Hoof It, because I can’t even pretend to be interested in football.)

Roughly half of these blogs are non-updated ‘dinosaurs’. Most of the ones by first-year students also seem to have been created for assessment as part of the journalism course.

On her course blog Samantha Viner writes that:

[T]his is for my assessment, a minimum of 6 entries of at least 150 words each. (Link)

That isn’t blogging as self-motivated publishing. That’s work.

I’m generalising, but the kind of blogs that people want to read and—more importantly—want to write, are the ones that come out of enthusiasm and interest.

Or, to steal a phrase from John Gruber and Merlin Mann, the blogs that are the product of “obsession times voice“.

That’s why I read their sites: because they’re obviously passionate about what they say, and they have a distinctive way of saying it. By requiring 900 words spread over six instalments you suck all the meaning out of it. And all the fun.

I can see why this has happened at Lincoln. It’s sensible to have students that understand blogging, for many reasons—technological literacy, the increasing use of “new” and “social” media ((Threw up a bit in my mouth.)), ways to interact and communicate with others, etc. Feel free to add your own. I can probably even think of how they were made (fully) aware of it and its potential, and the person who convinced them that familiarity with the practice was a good idea. ((Dave, I’m looking at you again. It was that bloody guest lecture last year.))

That person fully embodied “obsession times voice”. He oozed it. It was unsightly at times. (Kidding. Sort of.) That kind of passion would surely have inspired students to have a go themselves, at least a little more than having it imposed from above. ((For the record, the thing that convinced me to blog somewhat regularly was buying a domain. “I’ve bought it, now I better do something with it,” was the logic.))

Hang on a second

I can finally answer the TNTJ question.

I love blogging. I love it because I can write stuff like this, put it online for nothing, and share it with anyone who’s interested. Twitter’s great. But it’s just another outlet for “obsession times voice“, the same as a blog.

On Twitter you get stuff like this, this, this, and this.

On blogs you get stuff like this, this, this, and this.

And I’m sure you can find examples that show why you love, loved, or will love them. They’re just methods of publishing, so publish away.

Original WordPress comments:

Mindy McAdams:

Yes — “It’s sens­ible to have stu­dents that under­stand blogging, for many reasons” — but if they treat it as a class assignment (“a min­imum of 6 entries of at least 150 words each”), they will never understand blogging, will they?

I have taken it for granted that assigning students to create and keep a blog is the best way to get them to under­stand blogging. But maybe there is a better way. Hm. Thinking about that now …