That said, I worry that the blogging economy could eventually hurt journalism, moving us back towards a pulp fiction, penny-a-word pay scale where writers break pound out thousands of words for peanuts.

As much as I love my blog, I think we need to be careful to encourage employers to value blogging alongside regular copy.

Meranda: One of the biggest misconceptions about blogs (at least for people who don’t keep them) is that they don’t take much time. But just look at how long it took Mindy to write this blog entry. And her calculations apparently didn’t include the time she spent reporting — which, if memory serves, was at least an hour — or the time she spent responding to other comments.

So, as you can see, the time quickly adds up. But my output (as far as my editors are concerned) has increased because now I’m contributing to both our print and online products regularly. If your editors are interested in building your newspaper’s online audience, then, trust me, they’ll want you to be blogging.

A thought on Meranda’s question: maybe you could consider a slightly different format to an education blog. Use it to compile all the education-related stories appearing in your paper, as well as those of note in other local or national publications. (You know, the ones you’re reading to keep abreast of a situation or to get story ideas.) If you’ve got something more to add about the story, do it there, but briefly. When you’ve got more time, write a longer, more thoughtful post, but use it more as an organizational tool, information vessel and discussion board. Frankly, those kinds of blogs can be far more useful and far less time consuming than those that require one person to riff on the issues.

Good luck!

The more practical approach is to keep your own time spent on the blog and all your other work to the actual amount of hours they pay you for. And yes — that must mean that some of the stuff you’re doing in 40 hours now is not going to get done.

As Web sites become more important to the survival of the news organization, however, the editors are realizing that journalists do need to rearrange their time.

The time you give up outside the blog may be a fair trade for the benefits you and your newspaper reap from the blog. If the interaction with readers (in the blog comments) improves your print coverage, that’s a big plus.

But I have a really hard time imagining any circumstance where my editors would give me 3 hours a day (or probably even a week) to do it. I know it’s a lot different at a metro paper than a community paper, but still the question I’m wondering is how the blog workload has impacted their output in other areas, like, for the paper?

http://blog.syracuse.com/kirst/