7 sites to train freelance bloggers about journalism
Courtesy kogakure, via Flickr under CC 2.0 license. http://bit.ly/tzAfY
One of my small pleasures at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch is a blog our religion writer Tim Townsend and I created. It’s called “Civil Religion.” For a year and a half, it’s been The Little Blog That Could. Nearly every post attracts comments. It gets respectable traffic numbers (more when it’s featured on the home page of STLtoday.com, of course). And its following is a loyal one.
The blog started with a dozen writers from the St. Louis community, representing a variety of faith traditions from Judaism to Islam to Christianity in many stripes — Catholicism, Mormon, evangelical and Episcopalian.
About a week ago, we debuted an expanded stable of bloggers. Some had dropped out of the earlier group. Now we’re up to about 30 who contribute and, already, we’ve seen traffic increase from the more-frequent contributions to the blog. I’m grateful for their contributions and their passion for the subject. They engage readers, they are often insightful and frequently controversial.
Now, a new development: Public relations people have begun taking notice of the blog, and send releases to our contributors, all of whom have day jobs, some of whom are clergy men and women. They have asked Tim what they can do with the releases. Some are interested in pursuing interviews, doing some research on the books, people, products and events that are presented to them.
They want to be reporters. Read more
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