Devolving Ownership for Better Blogging

Now, that’s a challenge for existing editorial teams, where the editor is used to being essentially a despotic ruler, with the desk heads as the high priests*. It requires the editor to stop being a director, but move more into a conductor role, where they make sure that the various parts of the team are working in harmony, but giving each section basic freedom to manage their tasks as they see fit.

Equally challenging is that fact that this feeling of wonership also needs to extends to
 the technology journalists use. Most bloggers
working for media companies have the traditional partially- or
completely locked down laptop, chosen and built to a corporate spec,
rather than for the needs of the blogger. By way of contrast, most
effective independent bloggers are working on their own machines,
chosen by themselves, and with their own choice of software. For the blogger the laptop is their portable office, a communication device that is an extension of themselves (witness the huge degree to which many bloggers customise their laptops with stickers). For journalists, it’s another reminder of the fact that everything they do is someone else’s.

Finding an effective way to liberate employee bloggers from these
traditional corporate constraints may well be one way of smoothing the
transition into the connected journalism age.

Anyone got any ideas? 🙂

**Yes, yes, desperately mixed metaphors there, I know. *