There are blogs and there are bloggers. There are mainstream blogs and there are those that aren’t.

Blogging, in my mind, isn’t necessarily, but a new transition that is one part of a test of big media. Can they develop and innovate quickly enough?

Below find my 10 favorite journalist bloggers: reporters associated with a mainstream medium who actively blog.

Last month, on a well-trafficked post of mine from July in which I list the 1o journalists I respect most, a reader commented that he wanted to see some of my favorite bloggers.

So, I ranked my favorites, keeping in mind original reporting, news content, linking, impact, fresh voice and innovative ideas. Here they are.

1. Justin Fox on Curious Capitalist (Time magazine): He links. He thinks. He reports. He has a voice. Trim down some of those posts, and this just might be my favorite reported blog on the Internet.
2. Saul Hansell on BITS (New York Times): It’s put best by new media consultant Jeff Jarvis (highlighted below): “One of the best examples of the new newspaper blog voice is Saul Hansell at the Times’ Bits blog. He gets personal and opinionated and is certainly breezier than his print persona and he also makes artistic use of the link to bloggers’ conversations and competitors’ news.” [Source]
3. Dan McQuade on Philadelphia Will Do (Philadelphia Weekly): He’s funny, quick-witted and on point. While he doesn’t do much reporting on his own, he is a prolific linker, important in journalism 2.0.
4. Dwight Silverman on TechBlog (Houston Chronicle): He is surely among the most prolific and covering a popular topic for a big newspaper, surely getting it big traffic. Silverman is doing it for the Houston Chronicle, considered the best blogging newspaper among the country’s 100 largest.
5. Will Bunch on Attytood (Philadelphia Daily News): He is the biggest mainstream media blogger in Philadelphia, which keeps me interested, but I have expressed my distaste for how the Inqy operates his feed.
6. Jeff Jarvis on Buzz Machine (City University of New York): Like Kingsbury, this isn’t exactly the model, as today Jarvis consults more newspapers than for which he reports, but the prolific blogger does have a column for the Guardian. Additionally, the future of newspapers cannot be ignored, and Jarvis has long said print is dead.
7. Jim Romenesko on Romenesko (Poynter Online): Links galore at Romenesko, likely the best read blog in newsrooms across the country.
8. Alex Kingsbury on AlexKingsbury.com (U.S. News & World Report): This is a bit of a stretch because this is more his professional site than a blog for his publication, but it’s worth noting a mainstream journalist posting his product, particularly because he is among the reporters I most admire.
9. John Micek on Capitol Ideas (Allentown Morning Call): I’d like to see his longer posts replaced by more shorter, focused posts, but he has blossomed in the realm of linking. I am eager to include him to show that local and state government can fit in the form of speed and updates.
10. Mark Luckie on 10,000 Words (Entertainment Weekly): This blog is about technology in media by an online producer, so news isn’t the focus, but the concept of combining original reporting, linking and thinking is here. He has voice, too.

Hat tip to Ryan Sholin, whose March 2008 post is worth visiting for those looking for the best journalism blogs, as opposed to mine, which focuses on bloggers.

Who am I missing? Who else should I be following? Any thoughts?

Photo courtesy of CrunchGear.

Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell. AP Photo by Carolyn Kaster. Edited by Christopher Wink

This is the story of how more than 20 statehouse reporters fooled me into believing I had a hot-breaking story – for the second time in a month. Last week I posted that a personal essay of mine was accepted by the Columbia Journalism Review and appeared on the CJR Web site. My essay touched on a story that I think is worth telling more deeply.

Enjoy.

This past summer I was honored to serve a prestigious post-graduate internship with the Pennsylvania Legislative Correspondents’ Association, the country’s oldest state government reporting society. For three months I covered Pennsylvania state government in the Harrisburg Capitol, home of the largest full-time state legislature in the country, representing the nation’s sixth most populous state. On a rotating basis, I worked for six media outlets, including Pennsylvania’s three largest dailies. I worked with serious, accomplished journalists, a handful of them ranked among the state’s most influential.

Yeah, and they screwed with me a lot.

One

Before Christmas, the PLCA held its historic, annual Holiday Party – once home to the infamous liquor divvy. Being a good sport, a loudmouth and having a bit of a personality, I suppose, I caught an invite. It was a chance at free food, drinks, good music, a night out (albeit a two-hour drive or train ride) and to see a group of journalists whom I genuinely like and wholeheartedly respect.

It was also a chance for them to bring up the time that for an entire day this summer, they convinced me Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell was going to be named then-Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama’s vice presidential running mate. For at least three hours I completely believed I had the most meaningful political story in the world and not another soul on the media planet knew it.

If it seems cruel to do to a passionate, aspiring political journalist, that’s because it is.

Two

This blog’s focus is the trials of this young, multimedia freelance journalist in Philadelphia, so I can give advice to other media professionals, be they young, interested in multimedia, freelancing, Philadelphia, urban reporting generally or a combination thereof. I assure you, this is as good advice as I have ever given in my one year blogging on ChristopherWink.com.

Understand this: reporters, or at least the good ones, are dicks. It is part of a journalist’s occupational mythology, and these personalities dictate just what type of reporter you are.

Let me set the stage. During the second week of last August, I started pitching and covering state government for the Philadelphia Inquirer, a big metro daily, with all the sex and might that means to a young journalist. I got some great clips. As far as I know, only one of them was entirely fictitious.

See, the three-person Inquirer Harrisburg bureau tricked me into believing their editor wanted me to write a profile on John Micek, part of the Allentown Morning Call‘s Capitol bureau and one of the better journalist-bloggers in the state. Of course that doesn’t make sense. I maintain that I even said that when it was assigned to me.

But I did the assignment and, for a time, even believed it was destined to be posted on Commonwealth Confidential, the Inqy’s statehouse blog, even though I thought it was silly. My appraisal of most newspapers having no concept of new media made me fall for that one.

I thought it was a way for smart, fun, proud journalists to say the respected me, or at least thought I was alright for an idiot 20-something intern. I thought it was passing a real newsprint tradition, though it may seem faded today, to another generation (read, that is cool). I thought I got my tiny initiation, and it was done.

I thought wrong, of course.

Three

Newspaper reporters like to drink. They have to; it’s also part of that occupational mythology, one that has transcended to journalists as a whole, but it began with the newspaperman. So, of course, PLCA members, who subscribe to the purest tradition of newsprint, imbibe from time to time, sometimes even together.

Toward the end of August, Kari Andren, one of the other four interns was ending her internship, as would the rest of us a week later at the month’s end. It called for a night out. It so happens that my girlfriend was coming in that night, got there earlier than expected and the PLCA folks got started and ended later than expected.

I was still plugging away on some work with the Patriot-News at 7 p.m. when she made it to Harrisburg. It looked like I wouldn’t be going out. I hightailed it out of the newsroom and, after picking up the first two, ignored a succession of at least 25 cell phone calls from a variety of high-powered newspaper journalists – like teenager girls cellularly assaulting a girlfriend who couldn’t make it to the school dance.

After 12 a.m., I got a couple more calls, and, since my girlfriend and I were done with dinner and catching up after not seeing each other for a couple weeks, I picked one up. A handful of the hardest PLCA folks were still bumming around their favorite Harrisburg haunt on Second Street and wanted to meet my girlfriend. She and I stopped by, had a few beers, heard some jokes and left before 2 a.m. I never realized it was in my absence that my fate was sealed.

Four

A few weeks later I was getting ready for more than month backpacking Europe, travel blogging and podcasting at WeDontSpeaktheLanguage.com.

I got an e-mail from Jan Murphy, an esteemed member of the Capitol bureau of the Patriot-News, which has been Pennsylvania’s Paper of the Year for three consecutive years, according to the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association. “Thought you would want to know even the people who weren’t in on it,” she wrote, “were in on it.” She forwarded an e-mail from the Pennsylvania spokesman for the Obama campaign.

Sorry I never got to this guys.  Let me know if I can mess with this kid in some other way.  Always into the hijinks.

He was responding late to an e-mail from Murphy, which gave him the details of their plan and ended with this:

Chris also is FOR REAL covering the Howard Dean visit today, so he may be circling around to you for that. That is a legitimate story, not to be confused with the fake one we have concocted for him to check out.

Five

Dean was in Harrisburg to stump for Obama, who was still riding a wave of excitement about his nomination. As the conventions neared there was a growing buzz about whom Obama and his Republican challenger John McCain would choose as their vice presidential running mates.

I raced back from the Dean event, held at a Harrisburg high school. I filed a Web brief, beating everyone short of those bastards at the AP, whom I only beat once, on a story that was then picked up by CNN, and started putting calls out to spokesmen for Obama, Dean, McCain, the Democrats, Republicans and others – hoping to get a few returned to make a story.

A woman with cropped black hair was speaking in hushed tones to Murphy, nothing unusual in a newsroom shared by friendly, but competing reporters.

“Did you hear that?” Murphy asked me.

The woman she was speaking to, Murphy told me, was a former Patriot reporter who now worked for the administration. Rendell, the woman whispered to me smilingly, is going to be named Obama’s running mate.

“Well that seems stupid,” I said, though I immediately thought how beneficial that could be for Pennsylvania, Philadelphia – where Rendell formerly served as mayor – and all U.S. cities, considering Obama and Rendell both cut their political teeth in big urban hubs.

Murphy told me she was too busy to handle this and thought I deserved a big story like this.

“You can handle this,” she asked me. “Can’t you?”

Six

As I wrote in my CJR story:

What I felt then was a rush I never felt so strongly, not on different continents or jumping out of airplanes. I was in possession of the single-most meaningful political story in the world and not another soul on the media planet knew it.?? I caught the state’s Democratic party executive director on her cell phone. “Next Monday could be a very exciting day for Pennsylvania,” was all she would say on record. I actually got goose bumps. After some persistence, a Rendell spokesman seemed to all but confirm the rumor. “I wouldn’t be surprised if that happened,” he relented. A spokesman for Obama in Pennsylvania refused comment, but let on that an announcement was coming next week. A state Republican spokesman told me he heard the Rendell rumor too and wanted me to confirm it.

Throughout my call-making, researching and scribbling a handful of reporters came to the Patriot cubicle: John Baer, the esteemed columnist of the Philadelphia Daily News and Brad Bumsted of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

They asked just what Tom Barnes of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette asked when he came next: “Anything big going on?”

It was a question I heard ask in the newsroom before. It’s a question tied integrally to the history of the PLCA, which housed its competing correspondents from varied media sources in the same historic newsroom, cubicle next to cubicle. No one wants to be too badly beaten on a story. If you are, well, your editor might start asking questions.

So, out of respect, each reporter lets his competition run with what he’s running as long as everyone is kept in the game. So, when you’re particularly busy and something might slip through you ask, the journalism ethical considerations are daunting.

Murphy told Barnes no.

“I’m about to go home for the weeked. I have to meet my wife,” Barnes said. “So I can’t miss anything. Sure nothing is going on?”

“Nothing is going on,” Murphy said. “Right Chris?”

“…Nothing, Tom,” I said.

Seven

I was finishing up my Rendell story and waiting on a callback to finish my Dean story when Murphy’s phone rang. She held the receiver and told me her editor said he didn’t have room in tomorrow’s paper for my story.

“So wait for Sunday and run it big,” I said, giddy enough that how nonsensical the thought of this story holding another day didn’t occur to me.

“Or run it online big,” I said, new journalism pumping through my veins, picturing blog post and Tweets and CNN references to my story. My head was about to explode – when it did.

“He wants to talk to you” Murphy said, handing me the phone, as the cubicle filled with about every reporter in the newsroom.

“How’d it go?” asked the voice on the phone. It was John Micek, correspondent for the Morning Call.

The entire Pennsylvania political world was in on a prank to fool me for almost an entire Friday – a slow news day I suppose – planned the night at the bar when I didn’t show up.

Spokesmen, state representatives, other reporters, interns, seemingly everyone was in on it. I couldn’t do anything but laugh. Laugh and tack my completed story on Rendell’s vice presidential candidacy to the PLCA information board.

Now that’s a work day.

Read the entirely false story I completed here. Read my Columbia Journalism Review story. This was even better then when we had a cherry-spiting contest in the newsroom, or when I came into work wearing a mohawk.

Can anyone top that? This means they liked me, right, not that an entire newsroom was out to get me, right? Because that’s what they told me. I’m sure it wasn’t a vendetta.

Man, who doesn’t have a blog.

Any newspaper that can even be tossed in the conversation has someone adding to it. There is no end to the number of jerks like me doing much of the same, with less experience and knowledge but increasingly more interest than the more professional.

The question, of course, is if any of it is working. One of the simpler answers, I’d say, is, well, look at the comments. If they’re improving, you’re improving.

This is a generational thing, few argue that. But if a newspaper has young, interested staff, why aren’t they encouraged to engage readers more.

The Morning Call of Allentown, Pa. is a great example. Its state capital bureau in Harrisburg, Pa. is currently a one-man show, but one who is as involved as any.

For the Call, a good metro daily with a circulation of 110,000, John Micek is a whole lot. He pounds big statewide copy and hosts Pennsylvania’s first good state government blog, Capitol Ideas, beating the Inquirer, which brands itself as the state and region’s industry leader. (The Inqy’s Commonwealth Confidential has made huge strides by three smart staffers, but the paper itself seems to bury it and the blog’s Web address doesn’t make me believe CC will be there for the long haul – no blame to the Inqy Harrisburg bureau, of course)

Micek was recently named one of the 10 most powerful journalists in the state – one of the youngest on the list. A sign of the time is how four of them have big online presences – Micek, Mario Cattabiani now blogs and at the time Brett Lieberman blogged for their newspapers (the Inquirer and Patriot-News respectively), and Pete Decoursey, a former Patriot-News columnist turned editor of Capitolwire, an online-only news service in Harrisburg.

I came to know Micek through a helluva internship in Harrisburg this past summer, which included at least one faux interview with Micek himself. Micek is a smart 30-something willing to take on something new. He rightly and smartly questions some of the so-labeled innovation that is meant to save newspapers. But that doesn’t stop him from trying them.

Micek’s morning blog rants, where he takes on the state’s news is surely friendly to folks just trying out the news blog game. He’s taken it further by jumping on Twitter, opening himself up to more interaction with readers.

I know nothing of his hits and regular reader interaction. How monetized the Call itself is trying to make Capitol Ideas is beyond me – they run a single ad on the main page that is also filled on his archived pages.

But Micek is making effort plenty aren’t.

No one knows where newspapers will be 10 years from now. But, by my estimation, if a reporter gets e-mails or story comments, that’s good. If that increases with time, that’s better. Every business on the planet knows that encouraing its customers to be a part of the product – see company Facebook groups and, more traditionally, free shirts with cigarette company logos – so why aren’t newspapers jumping on board?

The answer, again and again, is that there is an enormous class of talented (and some less talented) journalists who don’t want anything to do with the reality that their job is as product-related as a washer salesman. Newspaper curmudgeons they’re called in the media blogosphere. Still other of these ideas I’ve accepted as part of the necessity that the business model – and folks with those minds – involve themselves in newspapers.

I know that sometimes, OK, maybe most times, reader response seems wacky. I’ve gotten my share of calls and e-mails and comments that didn’t seem to make sense. Indeed, response that seemed to waste my time. That’s why we need to better develop means of attracting and connecting with readers. So we don’t just get the crazies. We need to accept some comments, even if it’s harsh. So we don’t just seem pretentious.

If UtleyRules15 says your lede “sucks,” hey, maybe he’s right. Chances are someone was saying the same thing 50 years ago, but now it’s easier for him to tell you. Don’t criticize that, accept that it’s possible someone else’s opinion matters. Because he’s the customer.

You don’t have to bend to everyone, but we all need to better accept this as a reality.

Blog communities don’t have the same problems with viscious comments that many newspaper Web sites do.

New media guru Howard Owens posted on this earlier this year. He seems to say the same, the better the comments, the better the community and, in the end, better the product, which has a better chance at succeeding through this tumult, the newspaper bubble. Why are some blog comments better than newspaper comments? Owens says the following:

I would say, primarily because blogs get the close attention of their owners. There is little opportunity for trolls to get a foothold on a well-run blog.  Most blog owners apply high standards for the conduct they will allow.  They monitor closely. They participate in the conversation.  In other words, they are actively engaged and involved.  They are owners.

How involved are reporters and editors involved in participation on their web sites?

Not much.

And until we fix that weak link in our participation strategy, we will continue to struggle with developing the kind of online community our newspaper communities deserve. [Source]

Am I overselling the comments? Um, leave a comment and let me know.

Image courtesy of MediaBistro.

I believe there is some line of thought that only those who like you enough will take the time to prank you. If this is true, it is entirely possible that the Harrisburg bureau of the Philadelphia Inquirer, one of the largest and oldest metro dailies in the country, loves me.

Late last month, I was working on a large story for the Inquirer when influential Harrisburg correspondent and noted… prankster (the kindest way to put this, I think) Mario Cattabiani told me to drop everything and get on an assignment. He and his fellow Inqy Harrisburg staffers were launching a state government blog at the behest of their editors – which I already knew – and it was going live that day – news to me.

The editors didn’t want to seem to be biting off on the series of already established Harrisburg government blogs so they wanted to profile one of the more respected bloggers and suggested John L. Micek of the Allentown Morning Call, who hosted the popular Capitol Ideas.

I thought this was patently ridiculous but was obliged to listen to a distinguished and irritable reporter who couldn’t be bothered. “You’re into this new media bull shit, aren’t you?” he asked. All very convincing. Oh, he added, I need it in no more than a half hour.

Well, I approached Micek, scored an interview and went to it. Midway through, he got a call, answered it and, in answering my question that followed his hanging up, he told me the Morning Call was shuttering their bureau and, thusly, closing down his blog. This was also concinving, considering the state of newspapers in general and recent announced layoffs by the Call specifically.

Turns out that Cattabiani calling Micek and their ensuing argument – and the thrusting of me in it – about whether I could post the inside information about the (fictional) closing of the Call’s Harrisburg bureau was entirely fabricated. …For fun.

I did write that profile in 10 minutes, and decided no work should go to waste with the unlimited space of the Internet. Enjoy if you’d like, but, remember, the entire interview was a joke to Micek, almost all of what he told me was fictional. This is not real…

By Christopher Wink | July 23, 2008
This is from a mock interview. The information is not true.

With the industry in flux, blogging is on the rise, for some.

For others, like John Micek of the Allentown Morning Call, who has led the way in state government blogging with his popular Capitol Ideas, it’s on the way out.

Amid cutbacks at the northeastern Pennsylvania daily, their Harrisburg bureau, which features Micek and his blogging, will be cut, though no timeline has yet been set.

The married father of one has toed the line between objective newsman and snarky online personality since 2005 when Capitol Ideas began and thinks he’s seen the future – though his remains uncertain.

“In 10 years, Hell, in five years, we’re all going to be doing this,” Micek said of journalist-bloggers.

It’s a clear trend.

On Monday, PolitickerPA, a state politics blog, ranked the 10 most influential journalists in Pennsylvania. Of the 10, all of whom were from newspapers, two were active bloggers: Micek, who was ranked fifth, and Brett Lieberman of the Harrisburg Patriot-News and another hailed from an online-only news service, Pete DeCoursey of Capitolwire.com.

Micek’s blogging career started in 2004, when he was covering the 2004 National Democratic Convention in Boston. Morning Call editors asked him to giving blogging a try at the event, which he did. It stuck and after nearly a year of management wrangling, Capitol Ideas was born, and his audience, whom Micek calls “fellow seekers” had their guide.

Micek has spent the past seven years with the Morning Call‘s Harrisburg bureau. He covered the Capitol for Calkins Media for two years prior.

His journalism career comes after growing up on the road, cared for by his mother and an “itinerant” father, who was a traveling jazz musician.

“My father wasn’t home a lot,” Micek said. “I think by the time I was eight, I had been as many places as years I was alive.”

He met a lot of unusual people and developed three things: a love for music – which he continues by playing in local bands – and a voice and a love for writing. Blogging has helped that, he said.

“I think it’s made me a better writer,” Micek said. “It’s made my work more interesting.”

Again, the text of this piece is entirely fictionalized as a prank – on me.

Photo courtesy of Onemansblog.

BY John L. Micek and Christopher Wink | A1 story, below the fold

HARRISBURG – Carbon and Monroe counties would each be in line for one of the nine cashless toll sites on Interstate 80 under a plan announced Wednesday by the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission.

The sites proposed for Monroe would sit somewhere between Exit 293 for Scranton and Exit 298 for Scotrun and between Delaware Water Gap Exit 310 and the New Jersey state line, according to a map the commission released.

In Carbon County, the Turnpike Commission is mulling a site between Hickory Run State Park Exit 274 and Exit 277 for the Northeast Extension. There’s an alternate site between Mountaintop Exit 262 and White Haven/Freeland Exit 273.

Turnpike Commission officials said they’re gathering public comment and will decide by this fall the locations of all nine of the proposed toll gantries they want to build along the 311-mile highway.

…

Read the rest on MCall.com.

This ran today for the Allentown Morning Call. The coverage is part of a post-graduate internship with the Pennsylvania Legislative Correspondents’ Association (PLCA).