Tag Archives: Blog

We need this: Lashmar launches blog for journalism events, publications, etc.

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Investigative journalist and lecturer Paul Lashmar has launched a much-needed blog listing upcoming journalism events, books, and other useful tidbits for those following the profession/craft/hobby. The blurb runs:

“Keep up to date on the big name journalism lectures and conferences. Find out what new journalism book is worth reading. What’s happening with Britain’s repressive libel laws? Which university’s journalism degrees are the best? Who is doing important media research?”

It’s called The Rubicon and can be found here.

Some questions about blogging, from a student

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Another day, another set of questions from a journalism degree student – this time, one of my own, Azeem Ahmad. If you want to help him by answering the questions, post your comments below.

How important is blogging to you, and your business?

If my ‘business’ is education and freelance journalism, then: enormously important on every level: generating ideas, gathering information, publishing stories and ideas, and marketing and distributing those and, I suppose, myself as a journalist and (*cough*) academic. I find conversation extremely helpful in working through ideas and finding new information, and blogging is a wonderful way of having that conversation with some very well informed and intelligent people. I hope it makes me more intelligent and well informed in turn. Continue reading →

How do you measure a blog’s success?

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Brazil correspondent Gabriela Zago looks at the variety of metrics for evaluating the popularity of blogs. A Portuguese language version of this is available here.

There are many ways to measure a website’s success. Some use a more quantitative approach, and others are more qualitatively based. You can say a weblog is popular for many reasons, such as:

  • traffic (page views, visits, visitors),
  • discussions (comments, trackbacks, linkbacks),
  • position in search engines (page rank),
  • readership (feed subscriptions, blogroll presence) and
  • reputation (a more subjective approach, based on what people think of a website, and the qualifications of the person that writes for it).

If you obtain all that data and construct rankings based on these different types of information, chances are that not all blogs ranked will appear in the exact same position in each one of the ranks. Continue reading →