Encouraging trainees to use a blog platform such as WordPress, Blogger or Tumblr is a common approach in online journalism training.

The benefits in training workshops are numerous:

– most blog platforms are free to use and useful for training the basics of writing for the web;
– a blog post can replicate a standard online article;
– a blog is an easy to use, creative digital space;
– trainees can experiment with embedding multimedia and even adjusting html code;
– and, particularly for print journalists moving to digital media, the CMS of a blog often functions in a similar way to the CMS of a news media website.

However, if you’ve ever shown trainees examples of scrolling style stories such as the NYT’s Game of Sharks and Minnows or the Guardian’s Firestorm, you’ll often hear the question: how can we produce the scrolling style, especially for long form writing such as magazine style feature stories?

I usually point out the obvious, explaining that blogs do in fact let you scroll down the page. And depending on the level of experience of the participants, I might also suggest storytelling applications that onMedia has tested such as Creatavist.

But more so these days, particularly if I’m training short workshops, I like to introduce trainees to Medium – the blog platform developed by Blogger and Twitter founder Evan Williams.

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Prize-winning Guinean blogger Alimou Sow isn’t strictly a journalist. By day, the 32 year old works for an international organisation in Conakry. By night, he writes his blog immensely popular Ma Guinée plurielle (My diverse Guinea). With posts ranging from a reflection of city living to young men searching out traditional healers, his colorful and entertaining blog looks at the minutiae of everyday life in his country. We think this is akin to journalism which is why we have included Alimou in our Journalists@Work series. Earlier this year, Sow won Deutsche Welle’s The Bobs Users prize for best French-language blog.

DW Akademie’s Bob Barry caught up with Alimou Sow when he came to Germany for his prize last month.

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For the owners of small news websites and blogs it remains a major issue – how do you use Google and other search engines to get more people to come to your site? After all, even the most entertaining article in the world is useless if nobody reads it. We spoke to Sebastian Katthoever, from the strategic planning section of DW’s New Media department, about how Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) really works.

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Blogs make publishing literally anything online a breeze. And whether you’re a radio, TV, print or online journalist, a blog can offer a creative space to experiment, or a digital companion to your published or broadcast work – a sort of personal digital notebook – or, it can be whatever you want it to be.

Increasingly, many media outlets are using blogs in a more formal way – often giving journalists the freedom to explore a topic in more depth or take readers behind the scenes of their work.

But while technology makes blogging easy, starting out as a blogger and actually writing something worth reading can be a daunting task.

Blogging is a little bit like a digital writing adventure. And even though you might think someone is a good writer or a good journalist, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll instantly be a good blogger.

So, what follows here are a few tips to bear in mind for writing a good blog post.

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Here in Bonn the Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum (#dw_gmf) is underway and includes the award ceremony for The BOBs – the DW International Blog Awards.

This year’s winning blogger is Lina Ben Mhenni. The 27 year old university lecturer’s blog A Tunisian Girl was recognised for: “writing bravely about repression and censorship in Tunisia long before the international media descended on the country during the tumultuous events of December 2010 and January 2011.”

Freelance DW-Akademie trainer, Sarah Mersch, spoke with Lina and asked her about the Jasmine Revolution and what changes she is now seeing in Tunisia’s media.

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