Bloggers and mainstream media can cooperate
One of Toby's dino pictures, from the Sinclair station in St. Louis at South Broadway and California, near Interstate 55.
I weary of the drama that exists sometimes between the pure “blogging community” and the so-called “mainstream media.” If we can just communicate, we can work together nicely. I think we’ve missed some opportunities to do that at the Post-Dispatch, but I think we did it right this week with a story that ran on Wednesday.
The story was a brite about the disappearance of the Sinclair Oil dinosaur mascots in St. Louis in the wake of a takeover of the company-owned gas stations. My colleague Matt Hathaway found the tip on a blog called BELTSTL.com, which writes about local preservation and architecture.
It wasn’t hard news, but it was a worthy feature, given how ubiquitous the dinosaurs are on the Sinclair logo and the toys that the stations sell.
While Matt wrote his story, I reached out to the blogger, Toby Weiss, to ask for permission to run some of her pictures of one of the dinosaurs in the paper. She granted it, asking that we credit her by name and by the name of her blog. When the story ran, Matt included this paragraph in the story.
After rebranding of the stations started early this month, a local preservation blog — beltstl.com — broke news of the dinos’ disappearance. And since then, Sinclair enthusiasts have been ramping up their searches.
Toby was also happy to have us work on the story, apparently, because she was “ultra-curious to know” what came of the statues. Toby sent us a nice follow-up after the story ran: “Great reporting makes a good story. So glad you guys did that!”
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
Kurt's Tweets- Realizing how woefully out of touch I have been with this part of the county. (@ Saint Louis Bread Company) http://4sq.com/5z5Bfh
- Just had my first Gmail phone call -- with my parents -- and the quality was fantastic. Wow. http://tcrn.ch/a8GndI
- Another day, another interview. Fingers crossed. (@ Saint Louis Bread Co) http://4sq.com/avGImL
- Helping my son learn the first 20 elements on the periodic table. Disturbed by how many more elements there are since I studied this stuff.
- Giving blood. (@ St. Martin's Episcopal Church) http://4sq.com/aiWuEk