Slutty hippies and other bloggers

The Metro, Winnipeg’s free daily newspaper, is featuring two Creative Communications students’ blogs each week.

The paper, part of a large international publishing company, wants to showcase fresh young voices. Student bloggers get a new outlet they can highlight on their resumes and work portfolios.

Elisha Dacey, the newspaper’s editor, runs the newsroom, writes and edits stories, takes pictures and posts all this online. Oh yeah, she also writes a blog. And that’s just her professional life.

Here are her requirements for Red River Rants:

The RRC blog on Metro would be updated twice weekly, probably Tuesday and Friday. The instructors would pick the best two from recent student blogs. The definition of "best" will be left up to the instructors.
The blog can be about any LOCAL topic. It can be serious or funny or informative or any combination thereof. It can be about something that affects the blogger personally or an opinion piece on something happening in Winnipeg. A poem. A story. A Haiku. Whatever.

For this semester I'm choosing the blog posts.

The first one I selected was Be polite, you slutty hippie by Larissa Peck. It’s a clearly written personal story about bicycle safety, a topic a lot of Winnipeggers are talking about.

Besides, I’m a sucker for a grabby headline.

The second was Chalk 4 Peace by Erika Miller, a story of personal discovery, with a nice range of photos.

Peck and Miller are first-year students.

By Monday each week I will look at all new blog posts written by first- and second-year students and select two for publication on the Metro site.

Looking for blog-writing tips? Check out PR instructor Melanie Lee Lockhart’s blog.

And keep up (if you can) with CreComm’s most prolific blogger, Ad instructor Kenton Larsen.

Bloggers = journalists = PR and ad people

An article in the June 1, 2010 issue of The Uniter, Winnipeg's Weekly Urban Journal, allows a mainstream journalist to perpetuate a misconception about bloggers.

The article quotes Geoff Kirbyson, a Winnipeg Free Press reporter, criticizing bloggers as inferior to writers of his ilk.

“Journalists went to school and studied the craft. Bloggers are not trained,” he said. “They don’t do the work or attend events. They just comment on what they’ve read. If they started showing up at things and doing the work, then I wouldn’t have a problem with it. A lot of blogging is second-hand reporting.”

But bloggers actually are trained.

All Creative Communications students at Red River College are required to blog weekly. Instructors guide their efforts and grade them. Instructors blog, too.

CreComm instructors and students understand that being able to blog and to use social media such as Facebook and Twitter effectively are essential skills for our graduates, whether they specialize in advertising, journalism, media production or public relations. A recent survey of employers in our fields endorses this view.

And it's not just college instructors who are promoting blogging. Policy Frog on June 1, 2010 comments on Kirbyson's statement and argues persuasively for the validity of blogging as a journalistic tool.