February 27, 2005, 4.44pm • 42 comments » • 2,227 Views

The Observer gets a new weblog

Neil McIntosh, the assistant editor of Guardian Unlimited, has just announced the launch of another plank of GNL’s increasingly weighty weblog strategy - The Observer Blog:-

Rafael Behr, editor of the Observer on the web and a leader writer on the paper, is editing the new blog, and introduces it with an elegant piece in this week’s paper. He will be joined by journalists from the paper as and when; we’re not talking about the occasional passing intern, either - tonight, executive editor Kamal Ahmed has been darting away from duty editing this week’s edition to post twice, between deadlines. Read all about tomorrow’s news, right now.

The mission statement tells it the way it’s gonna be:

Times have changed since we first started our internal conversation. We
are aware that there are plenty more places that people can go to for
their news, comment and analysis than there were even 10 years ago, let
alone 200 years ago. But we still have loyal readers and we are proud
of that fact and grateful to them for continuing to read and - in some
measure we hope - to trust us. So we want to open up our conversation
to them. That is why we have a blog. This is it.

Good stuff.

They’re even doing groovy, blogosphere-type tagsonomy stuff. Ben Hammersley is on board with the project. More from Neil…

Dear all - please forgive the circular, but this is to let you know that
the Observer, the Guardian’s Sunday stablemate and the world’s oldest
Sunday newspaper, launches its first weblog today.

Edited by leader writer and Observer.co.uk editor Rafael Behr, we’re hoping
the site will shed new light on the workings of the paper and provide a new
way for readers to engage with its journalists. I think the first two
entries by executive editor Kamal Ahmed, posted between sending editions
to press, are a good example of the kind of openness we’re aiming for.

The new blog is here…
www.observer.co.uk/blog

The site’s mission statement is here:
blogs.guardian.co.uk/observer/about.html

Your comments would be very welcome.

The Observer blog marks the start of phase two of Guardian Unlimited’s
blogging effort, which I’ve been leading since since last summer. Last year
we relaunched the long-running Onlineblog (all about technology), and
launched three new blogs covering games, entertainment and news (all off
blogs.guardian.co.uk).

The blog experiment has been fascinating thus far, especially the
unprecedented quality and quantity of discourse between readers and
journalists we’ve been enjoying. We’ll be continuing the experimentation as
we continue to launch and develop our weblogs in the months ahead, aided by
blog guru and journalist Ben Hammersley, who’s come on board to help with
the technical aspects of our blog setup.

Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions.

Regards,

Neil Mc