DISQUS

Mark Dykeman · 1 year ago

I liked this and I think there's a good point here. Depending on your interests, journaling is a good solution for self-publishing. It tends to be forgotten by some given the rise of Blogger and Wordpress, but there's certainly nothing wrong with journaling. It's also very community oriented.

mattb4rd · 1 year ago

What advice would you offer the "journaler" that wants to venture into the blogosphere? Keep the personal blog as just that and start a "real" blog or just allow the personalized web presence to morph over time into a blog? Can a writer who is used to a random posting style "make it" as a blogger?

sarahintampa · 1 year ago

For a journaler to transition to blogger, the quality of the writing needs to be very high...and the posts need to be interesting! If a journaler wants to be a blogger, then I would ask them: What kind of blogger? What's the subject matter for the blog? How's it categorized? What will make your blog stand out? What's your audience like? Who do you want to appeal to?

Because blogs are not just random, personal ramblings...that's sort of the defining difference between journaling and blogging. Even some mommy bloggers are pushing out quality content these days. Note that mommy bloggers aren't just randomly posting - their blogs have the central theme of modern motherhood. You still need a core theme to make a successful blog work. IMHO.

RoseOfTexan · 1 year ago

This is a very interesting topic that I've seen discussed online quite a bit lately. You definitely captured the distinctions as well as made several good points. Most people forget when they make recommendations it shouldn't necessarily be about what they need, but about the needs of the person asking. As a side note (and somewhat unrelated), I wonder why you think WordPress is the best? ;) I know that seems to be a hot topic of debate on occasion, but I've used both now in the last few weeks and I don't understand what the big deal is about WordPress. Blogger seems to be able to do a lot of the same things (and makes it easier) so I can't help but wonder what I'm missing. I feel like asking for directions in a new city that has a great reputation. What am I missing?

sarahintampa · 1 year ago

Thank you.

I think the reason that WordPress is the best (and I mean WordPress.org - not WordPress.com) is that there is an entire ecosystem filled with plugins for your blog! Plus, you can really get down and dirty with customizing your site and making it your own. If that doesn't sound like something you would enjoy, you can find plenty of people to help you out - the WordPress community is huge. It's a powerful, extendable platform for those that want more control over their site.

Blogger's OK, I suppose - it is easy, but there's just so much more you can do with WordPress.

waferboard · 1 year ago

There is a semantic shift underway, something that involves that venerable institution, journalism. The earliest journalists were called correspondents, and still are in products like the Economist (best publication in the world). Diarists of the 18th and 19th Century wrote privately, but their works were then circulated, presumably after they had shuffled out of this mortal coil. Their stuff often reads like like a personal citizen journalist's blog. This word "blogger" is redefining the public/private sphere with journals, "amateur" journalism, commentary and hard-core journalism itself. I look forward to your future posts and thoughts on the subject!

sarahintampa · 1 year ago

Thanks. I will certainly do so. :)

SquidLord · 1 year ago

I would like to point out that aside from offering a distinction that's not a distinction, you may have missed the fact that all but the least of the bloggers and journalists do a lot more fact-checking than what passes for reporting in the mainstream media, if only because of the ease of and pressure to do something that used to be core to a good and important story: attributions.

TV reporters don't often attribute sources or references at all. Newspaper reporters only seem to do so erratically and with a definite air of "I know better than you what you need to know." But even the personal journalists are not only not shy but eager to cross-link to people they talk about, images they see, stories they're commenting on and so on. Hardcore bloggers generally won't be caught dead without footnoting the likes of which any 18th century correspondent would be jealous of, and any interested reader can chase those links all day long. If they do and come up with a different conclusion or a new source, they can immediately respond with and/or blog the new thing themselves.

In that and largely in the more traditional senses, bloggers / journalists are far seperated from the bulk of what traditional media think of as reporting, so much so that it seems overly divisive to not recognize that both actually do REPORTING better than the traditional media-imbued writers.