Trailblazing Blogger Not Always Sure He’s on the Right Path
By
Heather Somers
Fellows listen during Weintraub's presentation. |
Although he is considered American journalism’s first mainstream blogger, Dan Weintraub is still not sure if he is blazing a trail for a news-hungry public, or wasting his time communicating with a readership too small to matter.
Weintraub, a political columnist for the Sacramento Bee and the author of the newspaper web site’s California Insider blog (http://www.sacbee.com/static/weblogs/insider/), told a gathering of journalists attending a Western Knight Center seminar on the business of online journalism, “I am either a pioneer working on the cutting edge of journalism or a fool wasting my time in chitchat with a tiny and ultimately insignificant number of readers. No one really knows.”
Weintraub said the idea for his blog came from the stacks of notes, government reports and reader e-mails sitting on his desk at the Bee. He decided to use them all to create an electronic newsletter, and from that inconspicuous beginning grew the California Insider.
The launch of his blog coincided with the launch of the 2003 California recall campaign. The move to unseat then-Gov. Gray Davis drew tremendous interest from readers of the blog, and Weintraub tried to feed the frenzy by providing links to campaign reports or information from his own reporting. At the height of the recall campaign, his online column often was sacbee.com’s (www.sacbee.com) most visited posting. And he continued to write his newspaper column too.
“The blog and the column began to feed off each other. I would post short items on the blog, get feedback, update them, then polish them up and turn them into columns for the print version of the paper,” he said. “Readers of the blog, in effect, were able to look over my shoulder as I drafted my columns.”
The instantaneousness of the Internet enabled Weintraub to provide up-to-the-minute coverage of the recall campaign. Reports on his blog were credited with forcing election officials to expedite the counting of recall petitions and providing a detailed account of the mob of reporters tracking down one of the women who had made sexual harassment allegations against the eventual winner of the campaign, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
“But if journalism is the first draft of history, my blog was the notepad that leads to that draft,” Weintraub said. “Thousands of blogs clutter the Internet, but only a tiny handful are published by full-time print journalists.”
At first, Weintraub’s blog was like that of most other bloggers—unedited. But many people in his newsroom were upset that a mainstream journalist was being published without review by an editor. When he criticized Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante for being “not the sharpest tool in the Capitol shed” and added that he “would never have become Assembly speaker had he not been Latino,” the newsroom demanded that he be edited.
The paper quietly began a policy of reviewing his blog prior to posting, but when the Bee’s ombudsman decided to announce the decision, it sent a shockwave through the blogosphere.
Postings sprang up all over the Web denouncing the Bee’s decision and demanding that Weintraub be “unmuzzled.” Articles about the issue ran in The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.
“While the attention was flattering, in reality there never was a muzzle,” he said. “My editors at the Bee's editorial board—not those in the newsroom who had complained—were still the ones clearing my posts, and they changed next to nothing. The editing process did slow down my posting rate a bit, making it awkward to work late at night or on weekends, but it had little or no effect on the substance of the site.”
Since the end of the recall, readership and attention to his blog has quieted down, but he continues to cover the latest goings-on in the state Capitol.
Weintraub said he recommends blogging to any journalist, but advised that the focus be kept narrow—local politics, sports—nothing too general.
“The key is to provide information that people need and want,” he said.
J-bloggers must be committed to keeping up the site, he said, posting fresh material throughout the day.
“Always be there for your readers,” he said.
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