Recently I offered the Winston-Salem Journal some free advice (remember, it’s worth what you paid for it) and while I hope it was constructive, much of it was criticism.  So I’d like to take this opportunity to highlight what I think is a good blog post for a newspaper.

Managing Editor Ken Otterbourg has been hosting a blog for the Journal for a while now and I think it’s beginning to show.  His post today, How to bag an auto plant, is a great example of bringing a personal voice to his blog while staying on topic in regards to his blog’s mission and informing his readers beyond the pages of the "paper."  Here’s an excerpt to help me explain what I mean:

When it comes to car factories, North Carolina appears to be a
perennial bridesmaid. As we noted today, Toyota chose Tupelo, Miss.
(yes, it’s the whole Elvis thing) over a bunch of other places,
including a site in Davidson County.

Despite Detroit’s problems, car factories are still silver tunas, especially Toyota plants. One of my favorite sites, the Rural Blog,
which is run out of the University of Kentucky journalism school has an
interesting piece on the role the newspaper in Northeast Mississippi
played in the recruitment effort. The paper is called the Northeast
Mississippi Daily Journal, and it’s goal for the past 50 years has been
to tie that corner of the state together into a viable region for
growth…

The news pages of newspapers (as opposed to the opinion pages) have
always done a balancing act when it comes to being a part of economic
recruitment. I look at the Journal’s coverage of Dell’s move here, or
more recently, The Charlotte Observer’s reporting on the Google
incentives. We certainly understand that growth means—or has the
potential to mean—more readers and the like, but being a cheerleader is
a difficult role for many of us.

What I really like about this post is that Ken isn’t afraid to share his opinion, he shares a little background re. his favorite blog, he writes about something he’s obviously very interested in (the role of newspapers in the community and the future of newspapers), and he ties it to events that are of interest to his audience (economic development in the region).  On top of all that he gives me a great title to this post, although when I think of "silver tunas" I get this disturbing image of a silver plated statue of Bill "The Big Tuna" Parcells in "The Thinker" pose.  WAY too much coffee today.