Monday 28 January 2008

To succeed as a journalist means to be a regular blogger.

As yet I've never been particularly interested in writing a professional blog, based on my assumption that absolutely everybody will access it and the world will be allowed to read my thoughts; an idea which, frankly, scares me.

However, being told that to succeed as a journalist means to be a regular blogger has encouraged me to bite the bullet and give it a go. And so The Digital Newsroom Blog has been created, where I shall attempt to develop my blogging skills whilst learning more about journalism issues and debates from reading other people's blogs and familiarising myself with the general blogging environment.

My main interest in journalism lies with feature writing, particularly magazine journalism, and so I'm interested in evaluating the content of particular pieces and the issues that are covered in, or arise from them. It will also be useful to examine the ways in which these issues are received by users, for which I will search the Internet for comment pieces and opinions from experts of particular fields.

It is my understanding that good journalism, which I'm keen to reflect in my blog, should remain objective. Although achieving complete objectivity is somewhat impossible when writing about something that you're genuinely interested in, and so I appreciate that flexibility for comment and personal writing styles is inevitable.

Also, I have been appointed the task of blogging about current UK entertainment as part of my university journalism course, which to a certain extent refers to the magazine features I will be looking at, but also television, film and celebrities.