“As we have gone further down the road, we have moved away from using WKRN and its many blogs as a forum for personal opinion by our station bloggers.” -Gwen Kinsey, WKRN GM*
*Who was very, super duper, extra nice to me, by the way. We just differ on whether station blogs should have a point of view or not. I think they should, because a point of view is engaging. I can’t speak for her, but I imagine she finds it too big a liability. I respect her ideas about her new media enterprise, but I was initially hired for my voice. I felt I’d be selling myself and much of Nashville short if I went to a dry, opinionless style of blogging. Maybe I was wrong about this, but I thought NiT would be really crappy if I couldn’t express any opinion whatsoever about anything. We’d slowly built a committed readership who respected and valued the service we provided, which was blog aggregation that wasn’t automated and boring. I thought it was unnecessary to change the model. Perhaps a Digg-like NiT can be a rousing success. When WKRN rolls it out I guess we’ll all find out. I hope I was wrong, I seriously do.
4 comments ↓
I left my opinion over there and on my blog about this very thing. A few months ago, I was in Nashville eating lunch at Mothership, and I met a man with Huck who said he read blogs because of the personality. (This man doesn’t have a blog, but reads them.) He said that he is more likely to return to a blog that expressed the character of the writer. He said he grew weary of blogs that didn’t have that personality attached. (He was liberal, and said he liked reading political blogs but that he enjoyed the personal perception of the author more than just link-dumps.)
Very interesting.
I agree with you completely and have stated such. Don’t we watch Dan Miller or Anne Holt because of their personalities as much as what they are reporting? Isn’t that part of a corporate news environment?
An intriguing conversation.
I think they should, because a point of view is engaging. I can’t speak for her, but I imagine she finds it too big a liability.
I absolutely 100% agree with you. However, I don’t understand why they can’t avoid the “liability” factor by simply setting forth a few simple guidelines for posting.
I mean, sheesh, these are professionals after all.
I think they can handle it.
I’m still wondering what a New Sextra is…
I don’t even know if I have an old one.
We wouldn’t want to be too honest and tell people what we really think, someone could be offended.
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