Nick Robinson looking for "less abusive debate" on blogs

The BBC's Political Editor is interviewed for the BBC College of Journalism:



Transcript of Nick on blogging:

"I wrote a blog because a very clever guy who works behind the scenes, a guy called Giles Wilson at the BBC, came up with the idea that I should. I didn't even know what a blog was when he asked me. I mean this is a long time ago. This is almost a decade ago that I first started writing before I left the BBC to go to ITN.

"And at the time, really, I don't think there were political blogs at that stage. So I started writing a blog very early because some inspired individual behind the scenes at the BBC came up with the idea.

"And for me, I loved it because there were things that you could write that you simply don't get the voice to do on a tight news bulletin. I liked the interactivity of it. I liked the fact that you could be provisional in your judgements. It was a rolling process.

"Now it's completely different - there are lots of political blogs. There are people who can be faster than me on air because they don't do the other jobs that I do. There are people who do it full time which I can't possibly do. So I've had to reconsider what the role of the blog is. And in a sense it seems to me that any blog has got to be your voice.

How do you react to the comments?

"I've found the comments to be the biggest problem with the blog because while initially I liked the interactivity, what I've discovered is that a huge percentage of comments on my blog are frankly just abusive, either abusive of me, or abusive of each other or abusive of politicians. And I haven't yet found a way to cut through that and to get the sort of dialogue that I would really like.

"So I'm going to be honest with you and I've said this before and I've upset some people. I don't read the comments anything like as much as I used to because there is too much static white noise in them and not enough pure feedback. But if we could find a way of having a more thoughtful, less abusive debate via blogs I think that would be a good thing."

BBC's Kevin Marsh: Keynote at News Rewired Conference 2010

Kevin Marsh at news:rewired 2010 from BBC College of Journalism on Vimeo.

A couple of things I picked out at the time with regards to blogging:

1. "Blogging has done more to change the way journalists work than anything else thus far."
2. "Blogging has put expertise right up there."

Horrocks: 'Responding on blogs' leads to 'improved journalism'

Peter Horrocks, the BBC's Director of the World Service, discusses the use of blogs and social networking tools by journalists in an article entitled 'The End of Fortress Journalism'.

'But new news journalists will need the flexibility to cope. They will need to network with the audience as much as they do with their colleagues. The audience is becoming a vast but still untapped news source. The most go-ahead journalists are using social networking tools to help find information and interviewees.

'Responding on blogs and using those to promote a dialogue with informed members of the audience is leading to improved journalism. It can be time-consuming but it can yield real benefits.

'So journalists will need changed culture, changed organisation and an improved understanding of the modern tools of journalism – audience insights, blogging, Twitter, multimedia production. It sounds like being pretty challenging...But I suspect that the public may well appreciate a journalism that puts serving their information needs at its heart, rather than one which is about organising the world in the way that journalists prefer.'

Horrocks' paper was one of a series that the BBC College of Journalism have published (pdf) from the Future of Journalism Conference in November 2008.

In addition to Horrocks' standpoint, there are other passages on blogging to be found in this collection including: an outline of Panorama's uptake of blogs; a discussion about which journalists within a media organisation should blog; and a few bits and pieces on the use of blogs by journalists.