Newspaper Blogger Shares Stage with Publicists

Science and technology columnist Dave Brooks of the Nashua Telegraph has come up with a novel approach to generating material for his GraniteGeek blog on the paper’s website: He’s handing over partial control to the University of New Hampshire news service. The publicity organization will “post items about science and social science research at the university…directly on GraniteGeek whenever it wants (probably once a week), and I have no control over it,” Brooks writes. “That’s something that would have been unthinkable not long ago.”
It’s not unthinkable any more, though. “Slightly to my surprise, reaction in the newsroom has been uniformly favorable,” Brooks wrote in an e-mail to us. “I knew the publisher and online editor would like it, since it drives traffic, but even a reporter who I suspected would balk – he’s an uber-traditionalist when it comes to media ethics – thought it was fine, that it ‘added to the discussion.”‘ Entries from the news service are clearly labeled with their source. Staffers are also apparently willing to accept the philosophy that “standards are different for news blogs that for newsprint.”
–from Newspaper Deathwatch, a sturdy news site that’s nowhere near as snarky as it sounds.
We got loads of top-shelf journalists teaching at schools everywhere, let’s build a new model where student journalists get edited by profs and start attending zoning meetings and sniffing out corrupt pols. Crisis/opportunity folks…