Ed Cone
Columnist for Greensboro News & Record, blogger at EdCone.com

I am a professional journalist, and I didn't understand blogging until I got a weblog. I thought I understood it. I profiled Dave Winer for Wired, and I thought, "Oh, this is neat. I get it." Until I got a weblog and started blogging, I didn't really understand what it meant to do it. So the first thing I would say to journalists who are curious about this is, "You might want to get a weblog. And you can do it anonymously."

Let me report just a little bit about some common ground that has begun to emerge in my hometown. The sort of "aha" moment came about five months ago when [John Robinson,] the editor-in-chief of a substantial regional daily, started his own weblog. What they are doing--and what we, the people of Greensboro, are doing on our own and in parallel and with them--is developing a new kind of media culture. There's a lot of common ground.

If you go to EdCone.com, you will see a post this morning about two articles about last night's county commissioner meeting in Gilford County, North Carolina. The newspaper covered the meeting, and they covered it the way they cover meetings. They covered it well, but they focused on a particular issue of interest to the newspaper, which is economic development.

Another guy, a blogger, covered it too, and he focused on other issues. The paper has space constraints. They have to cover a limited amount of what happened at that meeting. Now the reporter Matt Williams can go to his own News & Record weblog, link to Sam Heed's coverage and say, "By the way, let me comment on what I couldn't get in the paper. I don't even have to start from scratch and rewrite it. I can just point you to Sam and then take off from there."

And at the same time, we have independent bloggers who want nothing to do with the News & Record, and they have created what I call an online alternative media of their own; they're congregating at aggregator sites like greensboro101.com. They are having blog meet-ups. They see themselves as competitors, correctors, potential contributors.

We do not claim to have figured out what is going on any better than anybody else. A lot of folks who are blogging down there are very interested in pushing this forward and working together and working separately, but there is this tendency to say, "Well, you haven't done it yet, so it's a failure. Nobody's making money, so it's a failure."

And I'll go back to what I said originally. I am a writer and a reporter, and I feel tremendously empowered as a professional by this tool.

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