Why Blog?

Someone asked me why I blog the other day. This wasn’t that unusual, most bloggers get asked why the blog but it did have a more personal twist to it.

This person asked me why I blog when I already have to write several thousand words a week for work.

You see I write for a living, I work for the BBC in Jersey writing articles for the bbc.co.uk/jersey website. With a two person team, to keep a site that’s basically the equivalent of publishing a monthly magazine a week going you have to write a lot.

We write between four and five articles each a day, some from press releases, some from the top of our heads, some from radio but most based on the big story of the day.

Each article comes in at an average of 600 words meaning that I write around 10,000 words a week not including e-mails, business plans, image captions and tags that go with the job.

So back to why! I was asked not only why but how I can find the effort and ideas to put together probably nearly the same volume of content for my blog as I do for the BBC.

I thought about this for about five seconds and then came up with an answer.

There is a massive difference between what I write at work where I’m being paid to do it, and what I write in my own time when I’m doing it for fun.

When I write an article for work it has to meet a number of fairly strict criteria.

As well as the normal BBC rules of impartiality, not expressing an opinion and generally just reporting the facts of what happened, I work for the BBC in Jersey so articles have to be about Jersey as well.

This is fine, I spent time researching an article, doing interviews and pulling it all together for a properly researched feature (or I take a press release and try to find the story) but it doesn’t give me the release I get when blogging.

You do get an element of conversation with the BBC Where I Live articles as most of the time the feature will have a ‘have your say’ box at the bottom of the page but you can’t respond as openly and freely as you can when it’s your blog, in your name and your own words.

The BBC has been accused of being full of left wing liberals, not true as there are a wide range of people working for the Beeb, but even if it was true we’re all far to professional to let our personal, political or religious agendas spread across to the corporations output.

That’s probably why there are so many BBC people blogging. As for BBC Blogs, I still haven’t decided where they stand, it’s an interesting juxtaposition between the open opinion of a blog and the pure facts of the BBC.

I did a bad thing early today. I wrote a post on another blog I run about the posibility of an English Parliament and some ideas I had about how it could work or how it probably should have worked.

Someone posted a slightly ranty, very offensive comment challenging my opinion and suggesting that I’m a sheep and not English because the domain was and EU one (I mentioned I was English in the post).

I deleted it instead of publishing it and joining the conversation but he did call me an f****** D******* so I got annoyed and deleted it - sorry I’m only human!