John Einar Sandvand / Editor at Media Norway Digital

Here are five areas where I think many journalists could learn from the practice of good bloggers. And yes, I know I do a lot of generalizing here. Many journalists are very good at this stuff – and there are some crappy bloggers out there as well. But still I think these are some valid points if you compare the typical news journalist with the better expert bloggers.

1. Linking to sources

It is a shame, really! But far too many professional journalists resist linking to the sources of their stories. And if they link, some of them prefer to link to the main page of the source, and not to the specific URL where the information is.

For an example of this sloppy attitude among many journalists you may check this story from CNN about the Chinese blogger Han Han.  There is not even a link to Han Han’s blog, even though that is the main topic of the story.

The attitude is quite different among many good bloggers out there. In fact most bloggers seem to love linking as much as they can. That makes it easy for readers to check their sources.

2. Updating information

Stories change. Sometimes errors are discovered or readers have good suggestions for how the article can be improved.

In the newspaper it is hard to make any changes – besides including a correction of errors in the next issue. This is all different on the web. Articles can be continuously updated and errors corrected immediately.

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