OJR now allows its registered members to maintain individual blogs on OJR.
Just click the “Post Blog Entry” link near the top of the right navigation rail to get started. You may keep an entry in working mode until you are ready for it to go live. Once it does, it will appear on your public personal profile page on OJR. (The “Your Blog” link over there on the right, if you are logged in.)
OJR’s editors and I will read all the submissions, then select ones to go on the OJR front page feed. You can find links to all the most recent reader-submitted blog entries under the “Recent Blogs” header on the right rail.
Blogs on Online Journalism Review should be used for any of the following:
Eric Ulken of the LA Times has used the new blog feature to highlight the Times’ new custom embeddable electoral college map and war casualty database. Chris Jennewein used the blog to write about his new Flip Video. And yesterday, Tom Grubisich posted a critique of the Washington Post’s LoudonExtra “hyperlocal” website.
Why blog on OJR?
You can start a free blog just about anywhere on the Web, from Blogger.com and beyond. And many of you likely already have a blog. So why would you post anything on OJR?
It’s simple: for the readers. A front-page post on OJR will reach several thousand readers via the website, our e-mail newsletter and RSS feeds. (Each individual blog has its own RSS feed, too.) Also, OJR front-page stories are indexed by Google News and Yahoo News, and are available for their popular e-mail news alerts. OJR readers aren’t your average Web surfers, either. They include editors, entrepreneurs and bloggers at many top newspaper and independent news websites.
So, if you want to draw the industry’s attention to some really neat new work from your shop, you want to comment on something you’ve seen in the industry that’s bugging you, or you want to rant or rave about a new tool or widget you’ve tried, we think OJR provides a pretty good platform for you to do that. Just write it up, and post it with us.
Thank you for reading OJR, and, soon, I hope to thank you for posting here, too!
P.S. Our USC Annenberg writers and I will continue to write for the site as well, so it won’t be all reader content on the home page, for anyone wondering about that.
About Robert Niles
Also, to clarify, if you’ve not registered for OJR before, you will have to wait 48 hours after registering before the system will allow you to post your first blog entry. (That’s so we have time to block registrations from boiler-room spammers and such.)
In my experience, a post-registration waiting period the best way to keep manually-pasted drug spam off high-traffic UGC websites. We expect that we will get some low-value stuff nevertheless, but we intend to keep that out of the front page feed, leaving that for more useful and interesting posts.