The blogging session at the BBC College of Journalism’s internal Future of Journalism conference in November 2008 was reported from the outside, through tweets by Paul Bradshaw and Dan Bennett and notes posted by the BBC’s Jem Stone. Bradshaw set out the corporation’s blogging rules: authenticity, a single author, impartiality, comments, commitment, and observing the conventions of the blogosphere.
The draw was Robert Peston, the BBC’s business editor, whose blog had taken almost eight million page views that October. His account of why he wrote it was practical. The blog was central to everything he did at the BBC, because it let him publish the detail that will not fit a two or three minute package on the Ten, and because doing so reasserted his ownership of a story. The comments were challenging and often generated ideas about where to take one next.
On risk he was dismissive, and for an unexpected reason: he applied the same standards to the blog as to any broadcasting, and reckoned written words carried less reputational danger than a live two-way, because they get read over more than once and pass a second pair of eyes.
The context makes the confidence notable. The first official blog by a BBC journalist launched in December 2005, written by Nick Robinson, and by late 2008 the corporation had more than 80, almost half by journalists. In 2003 a BBC columnist had written that blogging was not journalism and was often as far from it as possible, with unsubstantiated rumour and gossip masquerading as informed opinion.