The title of this post of course alludes to one of my heroes, Hunter S. Thompson.
He invented gonzo journalism (Wikipedia definition), a freewheeling type of reporting that is subjective and injects the author squarely in the middle of the story – one of his classics was “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign trail ’72.”
This post refers to gonzo communications of another sort, namely corporate blogging.
Some consider the phrase to be an oxymoron (I outlined this in my post Launching a Company Blog).
Jason Falls had an excellent post on the topic last week, Overcoming the Fear of Corporate Blogging.
Setting up a company blog is only part of what he advocates:
Conversations about, or those which simply include, your brand take
place regularly. A decade or more ago, they took place around the water cooler.
“Did you see that Bud Lite frog commercial?” “That McRib thing is just
awful. Don’t even try it.” “Can you believe this Saturn car thing? No
haggling for a price? I can’t wait to see that.” “Please, someone tell
Cindy Crawford she’s tone deaf.”
Today, those same conversations are taking place online.
The only difference is the four people gathered around the water cooler
are now hundreds, thousands or even millions of people gathered around
social networking communities, message boards, forums and blogs. They
are talking whether you want them to or not. (Freedom of speech is a
bitch, huh?) So you can’t stop them… But here’s what you can do: Participate.“
The rest of the post goes on to list common fears and mis perceptions about blogging and offers some calming advice for each.
To go along with the topic du jour, please note that I have updated my news radar to showcase recent posts on the topic (courtesy the MySyndicaat newsmastering service).
I think that if you read many posts on quite a few blogs, you could compare them to the new journalism style of blogging. Except the blogger is the subject and write of the piece. One blogger who is a doctor in Canada, writes about her experiences implementing an electronic medical record. the trials and issues that come up make a great story, and taken together read like new journalism.
John
Thanks for reading, and commenting.
You make a good point Perhaps the comparison of blogging to gonzo journalism is not too far off.
Bob
there are many different styles in blogging as in journalism.