Blog-o-riffic!

So, after several weeks, The Orion now has a blog up and running. The posters are The Orion's editorial board.

Getting the blog put together was done at the encouragement of my managing editor. She went to a conference back East during the summer, and came back more jazzed about starting a blog than I was.

Like pretty much everything this semester, there were hiccups getting the blog put together, so the it didn't actually get connected to The Orion Online until the fifth week of the semester.

Encouraging traffic will start a little more this week, as our P.R. rep is working on constructing bulletin board flyers. One difficultly is, with the constrictions of The Orion Online's template, it takes a minimum of two clicks to reach the blog for The Orion's regular site, which is really one click too many.

While the M.E. was excited about the blog, and I was going to be involved with getting it running, the editorial board at The Orion is made up of nine people, not two. Not everybody was enthusiastic to jump on board. It's been over a week since the blog started at the time of this posting, and only four editors have posted. Three editors haven't even started their accounts yet.

Is it an anti-blog mentality causing this apathy among the editorial board? No. They just don't fully know what blogs are. Some thought that they would blog about their daily activities. One editor thought she couldn't blog because she thought giving your opinion was required in a blog and she would lose journalistic objectiveness.

I can try and encourage and explain things as much as I can, but there are times when I'm explaining things that I can see it's just not clicking. They're viewing blogs as too far away from traditional journalism as being not necessarily good. As the online editor, my position at The Orion has a lot more open-endedness to it than the other editors, so we're not looking at this blog with the same perspective of content.

It's hard to encourage a change of routine at The Orion. When editors are responsible for over half a dozen writers each, and are usually up until 2 or 3 a.m. on Monday nights getting the paper put together, I can understand why they might see blogging as unnecessary extra work for an already hectic schedule.

But, it's not my job to accept those reasons. It's my job as online editor to improve digital content and transform the Web site from being where the print stories get dumped eached Wednesday into being a daily version of The Orion. When as many people starting logging onto The Orion Online on Sunday as on Wednesday, the online editor position will be reaching its full potential. That's still at least a couple years away, but I see it as being possible.

Being a daily means there has to be constant updates of content, and a blog is one of the easiest methods a newspaper has of having new content available to readers. I mean, if The Portland Oregonian can have 48 blogs at OregonLive.com, how can we at The Orion say just one isn't possible?