Dan Weintraub on blogging

Dan Weintraub is the Sacramento Bee opinion columnist who began to blog last April, just about the time the Gray Davis recall effort took off. His California Insider broke news often during the recall campaign, and on many days the blog was the most visited spot on the Bee website. Weintraub himself became an instant journalism celebrity and media pundit, after 16 years working in the cloud of obscurity that goes with being a Sacramento reporter.

Today, Weintraub writes for USC's Online Journalism Review about the blogger Joshua Marshall who raised money from readers to pay for his coverage of the New Hampshire primary. Last week, OJR posted Weintraub's thoughts on being a journalist-blogger and on the Bee's controversial (in some circles) decision midway through the campaign to pre-edit his entries.

In an early September post, I suggested that the state's lieutenant governor and the leading Democratic candidate to replace Davis was not the sharpest tool in the Capitol shed. Bustamante, I said, would never have become Assembly speaker had he not been Latino, but instead would have finished out his term as an anonymous back-bencher. That and a parallel slap at the Legislature's Latino Caucus got the blood boiling again in the Bee's newsroom, where several reporters demanded that my blog be edited. Until then, I had posted my items directly to the Web, while sending a copy to my editor to back read.

My editors agreed that I should be subject to pre-publication review, and the policy was quietly implemented. About 10 days later, however, the paper's ombudsman announced it to the world, garbling some of the details in the process. His column set off a furor in the blogosphere, prompting articles in the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times and a "Free Dan Weintraub" movement on the Net, where my blogging peers demanded that I be unmuzzled.

While the attention was flattering, in reality there never was a muzzle. My editors at the Bee's editorial board -- not those in the newsroom who had complained -- were still the ones clearing my posts, and they changed next to nothing. The editing process did slow down my posting rate a bit, making it awkward to work late at night or on weekends, but it had little or no effect on the substance of the site.

Since the election, both my posting rate and my readership have declined, as emotions have cooled and the political pace around Sacramento has returned to something of a more normal routine. But the blog continues, chronicling first Schwarzenegger's transition to governor and now his young administration. I've slowly transformed the site back to what I originally intended: a place to post an item or two a day, engage in conversation about my print columns and offer items and analysis that aren't quite ready for prime time.

As a sidebar, Weintraub offers his tips to journalists who want to start blogs.