My blogging class is wrong about everything

Yes, I’m taking a blogging class. No, I don’t know why.

Well, actually, I do know why. Journalism 358 is on my degree completion plan. What I really don’t know is why I have to take a class all about blogging if they aren’t going to teach me anything that has to do with blogging.

I’ve read most of the book for the class (nothing else to do in a four hour break between classes), and that is actually pretty useful. I might have learned a few things, not many that I didn’t already know from almost four years of blogging. For some reason, even though we have to read the book and take quizzes on it, the professor goes entirely against it most of the time.

We were allowed to pick any topic we wanted. Of course I chose the world of YA reading and writing. But we’re not allowed to do book reviews. Or talk about our opinions. Or do writing advice. Or ask the readers questions at the end. Or basically do any of the things that you would normally associate with blogging for that audience.

See, this is supposed to sort of be about writing the news. That way they can say that this is a journalism class. But my target audience, young adults and teens, are not going to want to read about news in the publishing world. It’s hard enough to get this audience to read anything. But if they do, they need personality and fun.

Not perfect AP style.

In all of the big, successful blogs that are not specifically news blogs that I know of, the posts are written in a relaxed style with lots of first person and opinions. Even a lot of the news blogs have a lot of opinions. In this class, we’re basically banned from having opinions.

I feel like, if I am going to be forced to write in a way that is going to bore my audience to death, then I shouldn’t have been able to pick this topic. But the professor did approve it.

I should have stuck to politics like I originally planned.

I think that the problem is that my professor seems to have a warped idea of what makes a successful blog. He keeps telling us about this restaurant blog that he wants to make with his wife. He’s had the domain name for a long time (more than a year, I think), but it languishes unused. He thinks that he needs lots of interviews with people and perfect AP style writing. And I know he will likely never refer to himself or his opinions.

But I think that most people read those kinds of blogs exactly for the opposite reasons. They don’t want to read a news article about restaurants. If they did, they would have searched for one. Blogs are for opinions and personality. News has it’s place, sure, but it’s more interested to read a blog post about someone reacting to the news than actually reading the news.

There are news websites for that.

It’s the personal touch that makes blogs interesting. And I feel like I’m being robbed of that for this blog.

But if you’re interested, you can click here to view our (did I mention it’s a team project?) introduction to the blog, which would have been a whole lot better if I’d been able to use the word “we.”

Hey, at least my partner picked a cool name for the blog.