E-Media Tidbits

U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Hey bloggers -- Guess who can't see you now?

This past weekend, while at the annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists, I had an interesting conversation with a couple of public information offices (PIOs) from the US Fish & Wildlife Service. When I told them I mainly work with online media, they vented a fair amount of frustration over a new online access policy change their parent agency recently made.

"We can't access blogs now. None of them. No one in the entire Dept. of Interior can access blogs now, as of about a month ago," one PIO said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "All of the sudden, one day we just couldn't hit those sites anymore."

According to the PIO, DOI will exempt individual blogs from the block by staff request. However, it takes time to submit the request and implement this exemption. That greatly hampers agency staff's ability to follow breaking real-time public conversations.

I was intrigued that government PIOs -- who usually only care about what appears in mainstream news organizations -- were so peeved by their recent blog deprivation. "When it comes to wildlife issues, a lot of important stuff that might potentially involve our agency crops up in blogs first," my source said. "Blogs are an important medium for several of our consituencies."

On the flip side of this topic, in an Oct. 16 CIO Insight column, new media maven Dan Gillmor noted that the biggest potential danger that blogs pose to organizations  is "not letting your employees harness the full power of an interactive, edge-in communications medium. If you keep the reins too tight, you won't reap the benefits of informed and passionate readers and users. And sometimes, if you're not communicating freely with your readers and users, bad news can catch them by surprise."

Gillmor continues: "I'd argue that a[n organization] already having multiple conversations with its constituencies will be better off when the inevitable problems hit. The reason is that conversation tends to engender trust. Control-freakish, top-down communications do not."

Both of these items indicate that there is far more power to blogs and other forms of conversational media than many traditional journalists may realize. This is not just about publishing information or having a voice, but creating value through conversation.

For a news organization, such public conversations can lead to benefits such as early project scoping or troubleshooting, staying on track with a community's needs or character, finding new angles and audiences -- or simply strengthening community ties to provide the slack you'll need them to cut you to get past the inevitable news blunder in your future.