Should journalists blog their notes?

Steve Baker over at Business Week has started something by blogging his interview raw material.

I'm going explain my thinking on when it makes sense to blog notes--and when it doesn't.

As a news publication, we get access to lots of people who have interesting ideas and important information. They come by the office. We talk, and often much of what we learn, while interesting, isn't really news. In our traditional magazine mode, those interviews would just sit around in our notebooks, rotting. With blogs, we can take a bit of what they say and create a post. But why not give the public the entire interview?

It's like a TV station that gets an hour-long interview with a cabinet secretary. Thirty seconds of it might go on the evening news. The rest of it might as well go online.

As a former broadcaster who flushed heaps of valuable material because it wouldn't fit the 2 minute 30 second cut with intro and tag, my question is, "why has this taken so long?"

This should be blindingly obvious to anyone who has thought about the media in this environment that saving and providing graduated access to the material is a perfect model when storage costs nothing and bandwidth costs are dropping like rock.

Years ago, about 1997 or 98, I had some discussions with a broadcasting mate of mine Lualemana Tino Pereira who was thinking about setting up a Pacific Islands News service and using Internet Technologies to do it.

The draft structure I came up with for him was along these lines. We digitally record everything for public use, if that means a 40 minute or 90 minute interview, fine. The journo or current affairs wonk then assembles the broadcast story which includes text (saved as HTML) and then presents the story, including audio cuts from the interview as an audio file (probably wav cause no-one had heard of MP3 in those days).

The editor then pulls together the stories for each bulletin and streams them to the transmitter at the appropriate time, possibly dropping in a 20 second headlines track to kick it off and attaching a standard sign-off at the end.

This might mean that the news bulletin consisted of half a dozen different voices all presenting their own material instead of a single newsreader to knit it all together. Mhmm, no problem there.

On the website however, you would be able to choose from a menu of options for each story. There would be the audio item as prepared and presented by the journalist, including any alternate versions used at different times or with a different emphasis.

You could also get the text and the clips as discrete files, they would also link to the entire original interview if you wanted it. The database would also give you access to all of the content available on that story over time, all material featuring that person or any story by that journalist.

Of course, these days you could also prepare your own story using the same raw material, blog it and trackback to the original and then have the whole lot aggregated in Technorati and podcast.

Speaking of Podcasts.

I find a lot of it really boring, too many people spending too much time being impressed with themselves for doing this stuff, bags of "in" jokes and godawful presentation of the cogent content. But time will fix a lot of that.

Some of it may have started as Joi Ito picks up on Dan Gilmore's Dan's minutes, 60 seconds worth of audio on a simple subject. I think he has something there.