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Location: Nashville, Tennessee, United States

8/26/2003

Chicago, Memphis Papers Launch Blogs
Blake Fontenay, a reporter at the Memphis Commercial Appeal, is launching a blog. So is Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn, whose blog is already up and running here.
Fontenay:

As of today, Backdrop is being discontinued. Soon it will be replaced on the newspaper's web site with a "blog" - basically a diary of items from my city government beat, suggestions from readers and attempts to answer the eternal question: What makes Memphis Memphis? Once a week, the best of the blog entries will appear in the newspaper's print version.
Zorn describes his blog as a regularly updated online journal containing observations, reports, tips, referrals, tirades and whatever else happens to be in my notebook.

Editor&Publisher says: "Blogs are a popular web phenomenon with hundreds of thousands of individuals writing periodically on their own sites about a variety of topics. Independent journalists and commentators such as Andrew Sullivan have widely read blogs, and a few mainstream media outlets, such as The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., and the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News, allow some of their writers to blog. The Chicago Tribune is probably the largest newspaper in the U.S. to run a blog on its web site."

Zorn told E&P he hopes "readers will bookmark the site and peek in regularly enough to persuade the decision makers in the fancy offices that I'm not out of my mind in leading the Tribune into this emerging hybrid media form."

No, Mr. Zorn, you're not out of your mind. Blogs are how good journalists will communicate with readers in the future. Bad journalists, and journalists mired in the old ways, will continue to fail to fully maximize the Internet and blogs, and will continue to fail to serve their readers as well as they could and as well as they should.