I want to show you different versions of first-person pieces.

The first is a story of inaction by a person trying to embrace his inner Hunter S. Thompson.

The second speaks of the importance of having well-chosen foes in your life. It is by Chuck Klosterman, the fellow in the photo above. If you aren’t familiar with Klosterman’s hilarious and well written pieces, you should check out any of his collections of essays. His most recent is called Eating the Dinosaur.

Tonight, we will break class up into three parts.

Part one: We will look together at your blog posts for Project No.1 and discuss.

Part two: We will look briefly at how three Web sites are covering Election Day and Night via blogs.

Part three: We will continue to monitor these three sites throughout the night, join the conversation via story comments and Twitter, and then write a 500-word blog post for your class meta-blog, due at the end of the day this Thursday. Your post will analyze how those three sites used blogs to cover the elections of interest in their areas and how well they were able to tell the unfolding stories.

Here are the sites…

MassLive.com
Of particular interest are the hotly contested mayoral races in Springfield, Agawam, Northampton and Holyoke.

WashingtonPost.com
The Post is looking at the national political landscape, particularly key races in New York, New Jersey and Viriginia.

NJ.com
The three-way race for governor between incumbent Democrat Jon Corzine, Republican Chris Christie and Independent Chris Daggett is being watched closely all across the country. What kind of local flavor does NJ.com bring to the table with its back yard coverage?

For your 10-point “referential” blog post due by class today, please make sure you let me know either via e-mail or your class blog which of your three blog posts this week you want to submit for the project. Adding a direct link to your project post will be most helpful.

One last reminder: Make sure these project posts are clean of typos, spelling errors, grammar mistakes, etc. I will be taking off points for these errors.

As I mentioned in class this week, “Halloween costumes for college students” has been bouncing in and out of the top 40 searches on Google Hot Trends this week. The MassLive crew said if you wanted to do blog posts that included photos of funny or interesting Halloween costumes or parties, you should “machine-tag” your post with @halloween as one of your tags. That way, your post will automatically flow into the overall Halloween page the site has set up.

So, you have your 10-point assignment due on Tuesday. If you wanted one or two of your other posts to be about Halloween, as opposed to your regular beat, that would be OK with me. Your call. Just don’t forget the @halloween tag. (If you have questions, e-mail the edit team at the site.)

How is this for a self-referential referential post?

Today at MassLive.com, I wrote about U2’s album The Unforgettable Fire and referred to and quoted from an interview with the album’s producers.

For class tonight, here are four links to read in order:

Link 1

Link 2

Link 3

Link 4

If you are having trouble adding embedded videos to your MassLive.com blog or having other actions render correctly on your blog, try one of these two fixes.

1. Under the pull-down menu for “Format” when creating or editing your blog entry, choose “Convert Line Breaks.”

2. On the main dashboard for the admin tool, under “Preferences,” choose “Entry.” Under the “New Entry Defaults,” choose “Convert LIne Breaks.” (If you save this setting, your entries will always default to this setup.)

Here are the two assignments due next week as well as a head-start heads-up on your assignment for two weeks from now: Project 1, worth 10 points on your final grade.

For next week…

1. Piece together a story fragment, similar to the Rumeal Robinson story or the SNL skit story we tracked. Dig up the original piece and the subsequent blog posts and news stories it generated. (If the subsequent or reaction pieces usurped the original in depth or prominence, even better!) Link to each fragment and try to paste back together the chronology of how the different pieces formed around the original story.

2. Find a “referential post” on a blog somewhere on the Web, similar to the first example of the three types of posts we looked at this week from Gawker. I want you to post a link to the blog post you choose and write a brief paragraph about why it works so well. I am going to ask people to present these on the projector next week in class. This example does not have to be related to your beat at all; it can be about any subject at all.

Due in two weeks is Project No. 1. This will be a blog post between 500 and 600 words. In this post you will be doing your own referential blog post on your beat blog. In short, you will be referring to and analyzing one or several original pieces. They can be news stories, videos, photos, whatever. In this blog entry, you will refer to the original post, link to it (with a good descriptive link), analyze it and blockquote from it. Your post should have at least one image. You will be graded on how interesting your post is, how well you execute it and how well written it is. Points will be taken off for typos, bad grammar or spelling errors. So edit it well before posting. We’ll talk more about this assignment next week in class.

We looked at a couple of different posts from Gawker in class tonight.

Recently, Nick Denton, the founder and big boss at Gawker Media, talked on a panel about the future of journalism. During the panel, Denton revealed a number of things about Gawker’s approach and philosophy to publishing, fact-checking and paying bloggers. He also said some things about exactly who the Gawker audience is and what they want in their online journalism.

Chloe Malle wrote a good piece about the panel in The Observer. In it, she quotes Denton on how much he pays:

We pay more than you’d expect! And kids want to work for us, and we want them. The average age of our readers is 28, about thirty years younger than the average newspaper reader. It is important that the people writing and editing are of the same generation.

And on Gawker’s approach to fact-checking:

We don’t. We aim to get the truth over time. The verification model is post-publication rather than pre-publication. Our readers correct us and we apologize and we change it. We don’t have time to check it all before.

Interesting stuff. What is your reaction to that?

Three different blog posts from the same Web site. What is different/the same about them?

Post 1

Post 2

Post 3