When Blogs Turn Pro?
By Shaun Kenney | Wednesday, October 12th, 2011 | TechnologyYou know what they say in journalism: when a dog bites a man, that’s not news. But when a blog buys a newspaper….Tom Knighton, owner of Albany, Ga.-based political blog Laws N’ Sausages, has formed a company to purchase community weekly The Albany Journal.
“Since Knighton was young, he has wanted to be a newspaper man.
“‘Being a journalist is just something I have always wanted to do, and when an opportunity like that drops in your lap, you do not turn it down,’ says Knighton.
“‘This paper has not been dying, this paper is not dying at all, it is doing very well, and it turns out there is a trend throughout the country for community papers,’ says Knighton.”
…
As far as he (and we) know, this is the first time a blog has bought a newspaper.
Blogs emerging into print media while the print media is dying back into blogging?
Imagine that.
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About the author
Shaun Kenney is the Chairman of the Fluvanna County Board of Supervisors, former Communications Director for the Republican Party of Virginia, and an active blogger since 2002. Shaun lives in Thomas Jefferson's backyard with his wife, six children, and a modest attempt at a farm in Kents Store, Virginia.
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6 Responses to "When Blogs Turn Pro?"
We buy the RTD. We send Schapiro away from the State house and out to review local theatre; and have Bob Brown not only photograph political events but write about them. We fire anyone who has ever intimated in print in the RTD that he and his insufferable baby boomer buddies know best how to engineer Regional Cooperation, or that such engineering attempts might actually be a good idea, or might work, at all, ever, anywhere.
We hire an editor for the editorial page whose job it is to research every political Letter to the Editor that the paper is considering publishing. Said editor will call up each contributor under serious consideration for publication to see if that person could possibly have composed the letter he or she submitted. Said editor may also call friends at other papers, to say, “Have you gotten any letters to you about [politico] that have this wording…” and if such letters turn out to be form letters written by campaigns, said editor may spike said letters.
We deep six any Sunday Flair article that sounds like it could have come out of Oprah’s magazine. We send out the Sports reporters to review restaurants, and the restaurant reviewers to write Metro stories. Reporters are encouraged to have and use work Twitter accounts. (Some of the TV stations and reporters in Richmond are doing well there).
Then we put the RTD site onto WordPress or something else that doesn’t have underneath it a database the size and speed of the Norwegian Siren of the Seas, and *.asp code working poorly running the thing. We will have a search engine that finds things related the requested searches, and we will have the search results ordered by date. We will ban ads that are animated, bounce, curl, or pop up or under.
Finally, if possible, we give raises to our dead-tree version newspaper carriers.
Conservativa – that was proprietary.
With Media General stock trading around $1.50, why not take the whole thing over?
Except others have tried, but the real voting power, and shares, is still held in Bryan family hands.
I suggest something more entertaining…Style Weekly.
Style Weekly is owned by Media General, is it not?
Landmark Communications
Con: If you eliminate the letters about politics written by campaigns, you’ve eliminated the letters about politics. I was very disillusioned when I learned this lo those many moons ago.
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