16 Ways The News Media Can Use Blogs
This is not a complete list of how the news media can use blogs, but it provides several ideas for journalists who are scratching their heads about how to launch blogs that serve a purpose other than as another distribution channel for content.
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece lands mid-debate. In September 2006, Adrian Holovaty argued in 'A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change' that papers were wasting the web on repackaged print, and by early March 2007 the Online Journalism Review was hosting a pointed exchange over whether blogs were a 'parasitic' medium feeding off mainstream outlets. Slate had weighed in on blogging's place in journalism back in January 2006.
Against that backdrop, The Bivings Report — a corporate communications blog rather than a newsroom — offers working journalists a practical menu: sixteen uses for blogs that go beyond being 'another distribution channel.' Its value is less as news than as a counterargument to the parasitism charge, reframing staff blogs as tools for sourcing, transparency, and beat-level conversation.
First-order effects
- Newsroom editors deciding whether to greenlight staff blogs immediately gain a checklist that answers the most common objection — that a paper's blog would just mirror its own coverage — by specifying purposes like reader conversation and beat reporting instead.
Second-order effects
- If newspapers adopt blogs as genuine reporting tools, they start competing with independent bloggers in the same conversational space, making the discoverability problem raised in 'How do I get my blog to show up?' a newsroom operational issue rather than just an amateur blogger's worry.
Third-order effects
- Widespread adoption of purpose-driven blogs pushes newspaper sites toward the structural shift Holovaty described — away from static story dumps and toward web-native formats where the site functions as a platform for ongoing public conversation.
The trend: News organizations are shifting from treating the web as a reprint medium to building conversational, blog-format products into their core editorial workflow.