Old Media Blogs

Several items to bring together here. The umbrella is television stations and newspapers stepping into blogging.

Nashville's alt-weekly, the Nashville Scene has, after a couple of false starts, opened its own blog, the misfortunately named Pith in the Wind. It's a group blog open to all the staff there, which is a good idea. Political reporter and columnist Roger Abramson might make it worthwhile. But that header graphic just screams "We don't get this blogging thing!" The Memphis Flyer might want to watch how this goes.

Memphis television news station WREG/3 has two blogs. One by weekday evening anchor Pam McKelvy and the other by lead meteorologist Tim Simpson. McKelvy's blog right now has a ton of pictures from the past decade or so. Who knew she was Miss Kansas? Lovely, photogenic woman; we'll see how the content turns out. Tim Simpson's is a much more personal blog, where he talks about family quite a bit. I'm not sure what the purpose of these blogs is, other than trying to "personalise" these people to viewers It will be interesting to see how their posting meshes with the constrictions of a company-owned and controlled blog. I somehow doubt we'll see anything as in-depth, behind-the-scenes, more-on-the-story, opinion and commentary spiced, as Darrell Phillips' blog.

One note to the webmaster: Why are you using Java to launch feature-disabled browser windows, instead of providing direct HTML links? After all, the blogs are on Blogspot for heaven's sake. It's not like you've got something to protect here, is it? Sheesh...corporate thinking.

The Commercial Appeal still maintains their stable of blogs, up to 8 now. Some are defunct (and a couple more no longer listed), many anemic, some just adjuncts to print projects. Only Leslie's "Whining and Dining" seems to be a success in blogging terms. Even here, I'm not sure it's a pure success, as she mainly seems to use it to troll for ideas and strip-mine for stuff to put in the paper. I cannot fail to mention Eric's blog. He is someone who truly "gets" blogging; I know because we've talked about it. But his CA blog seems a bit of an orphan right now. And a guy whose gift of story-telling, eye for people and fount of stories would make him a great blogger, Jon Sparks, no longer blogs. Come back Jon!