Reader Q: Blog posts going live with or without editor approval?

A reader e-mailed and asked this question: “Is it common for papers to require editor approval before blog posts go on the Web?”

Here is my response:

It depends on the organization and the journalist. Some organizations only require editing for certain journalists and beats. It’s hard to make an egregious error with sports reporting, for instance. 

Even those that require editing for longer posts, usually would not bother for shorter posts. If a journalist can’t write 100-300 words without making spelling mistakes, being libelous or just being factually incorrect, should they really be employed as a journalist?

Most of the best beat bloggers we follow — all professional journalists — post live to their blogs without editors. BeatBlogging.Org’s posts go up unedited.

We’re hired to be professional writers.We should be able to write fairly clean copy that is spell checked, factually correct and isn’t libelous. Now, if I were working on a long post for several days at BeatBlogging.Org, I’d probably have it edited by Jay Rosen first. That kind of post, however, probably isn’t time sensitive. 

A news organization cannot edit every post and piece of content and expect to succeed on the Web.  Some content is simply too time sensitive for that kind of bottleneck. Most news organizations with blogs usually have at least a few bloggers that deal with beats that are very time sensitive. 

If you don’t trust a journalist to write simple posts without mistakes, don’t give them a blog. Simple as that. 

For everyone else, I’d allow them to write short posts that go up unedited. I would, however, make yourself or someone else available to edit longer, more in-depth posts when a journalist wants a second opinion. You don’t want to put your journalists into an uncomfortable position where they are posting content that they are not 100 percent comfortable with.

You’ll have a tough time being successful with beat blogging if everything has to get approval. In fact, I’d be shocked if that was a successful strategy. Can you imagine every little blog post, tweet, status update, etc needing approval?

Some news organizations would require longer posts to be edited. Others would not. Some bloggers simply don’t need someone editing all of their content to be successful (rather, editing hampers their ability to be successful). Others will want an editor to be available.

Ultimately, your news org will have to decide if there are certain kinds of content they want edited first. If the answer is yes, some content has to edited, then your paper will need to make someone available whenever to edit blog posts. A good blog cannot wait hours for an editor to get around to editing a post.

I also put this question to Twitter. Here are some of the response I got:

@joeruiz I have to read through the blog posts on our site before publishing. But my primary job is to check for libel and copy edit.

@damelemin For @qctimes and @quadsville staff blogs, some are edited, some not. Our EIC trusts reporters’ judgment. Short posts def not. Some [reporters] are not comfortable posting unedited content. For others, they only ask for edits when they want/need 2nd opinion.

@paulbalcerak Web content isn’t newsprint & can be fixed/edited any time.

@kimbui at my former paper, some required an editor, some did not, depended on the blog.

@debmarkham Since we hand pick our bloggers and offer them guidance, we trust them to post straight to the Web. (HamptonRoads.com)

What are the policies like at your news organization? Can journalists make blog posts without prior approval?