Guide for a Sports Issues Blog

The way to go about developing and sustaining a purpose for a blog is to make sure you know what you are talking about, that certain topic of choice and how you are going to keep people’s attention on it. Personally, I tried to make personal connections as often as possible to the stories or topics that I was writing about. Then, when I couldn’t make a personal connection, I gave statistics and made sure that the topics were well researched. Researching the topics was a big way that helped me develop a purpose, or theme, for the blog. It made everybody realize that I knew what I was talking about and that they could trust what I said about a topic. These are a couple of the different ways that I developed a purpose for my blog.
There are many different ways that I came up with ideas for my posts. Generally it is a very well known athlete that is always coming up, such as Michael Vick or O.J. Simpson. I also came up with ideas by looking through the top stories, and just a few hard to find ones, on sports sites such as ESPN, yahoo, and fox sports. Then, with stories like the Greg Oden one, where it talks about him being done for his complete rookie season, I would make a personal connection. On the rare occasion that I watch the news, I’ll watch the sports section and listen for an interesting issue to crop up and write about that. Or typically when I’m in the dorm, I’ll have one of three things going on: music on my computer, or on the television either a movie or more likely some kind of sports show, like sports center or pardon the interruption. I would watch these shows then research them further and then put all the ideas onto the computer and try and pull them out into paragraph form from there.
I don’t have too much of any writing approaches. I am not the type to take and write down all of my ideas on paper, then decide what goes where before I write the paper, or whatever it might be. I typically just go and find out a little about what I’m going to write about and then just start writing. I follow the guidelines as I go and try and keep it in order from there without being too repetitive at all. So as I said before, I really don’t have much of a feel for writing approaches or processes to help me do an assignment. I just, as some would say, go with the flow.
There are many ways that I include outside sources while I am writing about my blog topics. I, of course, use the quotation marks every time I use a quote from an outsider. I also, quite often, take the web address and make a link to it at some point in the blog. I usually do this when I make a reference to the website, such as “according to ESPN sources,” I would just make a link to it right there where it says ESPN.
I know this is pretty much the same way that I develop and sustain a theme or purpose for the blog, but the way that I catch people’s attention is to make personal references to the topic I am writing about. People tend to comment that this is an effective way of getting a point across to them, and that it makes it look more like I know exactly what I’m talking about rather than generalizing because of what someone else says, or even worse, guessing. And again, like the developing a theme for the blog, I also research the topics very in depth. Again, it makes it look as I know what I’m talking about, or at least care enough to research the topic with depth, not just trying to guess at what people want to hear, but giving them the facts.
I connect with my audience by giving my opinion more often than not. There are some topics that I just cannot find somewhere to fit in opinion, as if I can’t find somewhere that it would make sense for it to be. An example of this would be in the blog about the death of Washington Redskins’ safety Sean Taylor. That is an example of a blog where people are just to more likely want to know what happened, and how it happened, rather than hear about a personal experience, due to the fact that hearing about someone getting shot from a personal experience is not necessarily something that most people want to hear about.
I develop a voice in my blogging community by simply using common sense and not talking trash to people, for example, giving someone a bad comment on their blog, therefore pissing them off and making me known as someone who would talk trash about you blogs right off the bat. That is one of the best ways to develop a voice, being polite and knowing what you’re talking about (i.e. - my well researched topics). The general do’s and don’ts are relatively simple. As I said before, don’t talk trash to the other bloggers, especially on their blogs, and definitely don’t start out thinking you know everything about the community you’re within. That will get you more mistrust than anything in a flash. Now as for the do’s, that’s a little bit tougher. You have to start out slow, take it easy for a little bit, and work your way in to the top of the community. Everything that I learned about the genre I pretty much just told you. It all has to do with the do’s and don’ts and then how you develop your voice in the community. Those things right there are what help determine whether you’re meant for that specific genre. Now for my specific genre, sports issues, I learned that I have to be much more specific when it comes to choosing the topics. I can’t pick any general sports story, I have to make sure that it’s an issue throughout at least one sport, if not the whole sporting world.