Big city newspapers get blog friendly

Market Watch reported The San Francisco Chronicle plans to launch blogs "in the near future," according to Robert Rosenthal, the newspaper's managing editor. But the "exact form and structure ... so that it fits journalistic standards," is up in the air, he told a reporter from the Contra Costa (Calif.) Times. Adding Web logs to its editorial mix will put the Chronicle in the company of several major publications, including The New York Times and the Dallas Morning News, which also have added bloggers' voices. "As long as we can stay within the bounds of accuracy and impartiality, and where it doesn't mean reporters are spending their day blogging instead of reporting, I see a place for it," said Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times.

Blogging was also the subject of a workshop program at the NAB, with the title "Are We Becoming Irrelevant?" An audience of about 50 attended, three of whom said they were bloggers, and most of whom said they read other peoples' blogs, LostRemote.com reported. Most also indicated they knew what podcasting is, but only five said they listen to any of the audio programs which are delivered over the Internet for playback on portable media devices.

This is good news. I decided to try to see where these other papers were supporting blogs, and ran across A Blog Commentary on the NYT site, but it was about Annotated NYTimes which is a subset of BlogRunner. It is one of Pogue's Posts, but I really would not call it a blog, even though it does permit comments, because it

• Has no RSS feed
• Does not permit TrackBacks

The Dallas Morning News does have RSS feeds for its news stories, and it does provide forums, but I would not call either of them blogs.