In the 2009 winter semester, students on the core Integrated Journalism course at the University of British Columbia took up blogging as coursework, with the case for it set out in an accompanying piece for PBS MediaShift. The blogs covered Canadian foreign policy, spirituality and Latin American culture.
Teaching blogging sounds odd until the format is treated as a delivery system that may or may not carry journalism. The comparison used in class was the newspaper: the Daily Star and the Sun are nothing like the Times or the Guardian, yet all are papers. What makes a blog a blog is the set of practices that grew up alongside the technology — most recent post first, a personal and informal register, links out to other sources, comments open to readers — as print evolved its conventions.
Students were advised to treat it as four things: a delivery system for material that does not fit the conventions of a news story; a way of communicating analysis and commentary conversationally; a way of reaching audiences in a personal voice rather than an abstract voice of authority; and a platform for discussion.
Each blog needed a focus on which the student could draw on personal knowledge, and the point was critical thinking, not a pedestal for opinion. The content was unfiltered: students published live, with faculty supervising afterwards.
The MediaShift argument was that journalism had become more conversational and iterative as readers sought to contribute and journalists opened their processes to view, and that blogging’s part in that earned it curriculum space.