My friend and colleague Barney Lerten is the major reporter for news website Bend.com (which also gets printed as The Bugle for local offline folks). Now this is a news website where news articles and press releases are posted, and then people have an opportunity to comment (though due to administrative difficulties the comments system has lapsed almost entirely into obscurity and unusability), so you can see it's similarity to being a very, very big blog.. where each of the major articles are professionally reported (and the press releases are fact checked, which puts it ahead of Slashdot ;)
Barney has been handling upwards of 50 stories (not mentioning 140 press releases) per week at Bend.com, each an average of 700 words (some in excess of 4,000 words), for over four years. Now he hangs out with us Central Oregon bloggers all the time, and he decided he wanted to see what it was like to write a blog.
Alright, so, if you were already quite possibly the most prolific blogger on planet Earth and wanted to know what it would be like to blog, what would you do? Would you start a blog? Barney started two blogs.
Please Release Me [rss] is a blog/website where Barney will culminate all of the finer points about how Press Release writers can make life easier for Newspaper folks, and get for their releases the maximum amount of attention and exposure. He's starting with just the basic things, like remember to include the date and location of events in event press releases or nobody might show up, and don't attach 7mb mug shots to press releases. Many email servers reject attachments of that size.
Barney's BendBlog [rss] is more of your pedestrian weblog. So far it's already sporting twice as many posts than this blog for the month of October ;)
So go visit Barney's new projects and wish him well. Rumor has it that this weekend he will try to pull off an even more amazing stunt.. taking a couple of days off ;)
Posted by jesse at October 6, 2004 08:35 AMWow, how does he find the time?
Posted by: DeAnn at October 6, 2004 11:54 PMWell, who knows if I WILL find the time. I should mention that I'm still feeding lots of funny stuff to Jake for my other favorite local blogsite, Utterly Boring. I just decided the press release site could help me when folks say "I don't know how to do press releases!" I still can point them to the ones we post for some ideas, but ask them to read the blog for what NOT to do. (And while I was quite impressed with Squarespace, it was very gratifying to hear that Jake, far more of an expert in these things, also found much to like;-)
So wish me luck, and don't be too hard on me if a few days go by between posts on either/both.
Oh, and Jesse? I do NOT fact-check the press releases. Where in the heck would I find time for THAT? I barely have time to fix the basic grammar/style stuff!
Posted by: Barney at October 7, 2004 12:14 AMI was refering to a very basic level of fact checking, where baldly eroneous material gets tossed, which you don't get if you just let people enter posts directly onto the website or anything like that ;)
Posted by: Jesse Thompson at October 7, 2004 02:16 PMAh. Understood. (And now I have that blog to vent on the stuff I either get tired of fixing, or don't have time to fix;-)