Plusses and minuses to writing, blogging as biz reporter

Being a business journalist today means spending more time on the job to write stories for the newspaper as well as items for a blog, said Greg Ip, senior special writer for The Wall Street Journal, on Monday.

“My priority is still getting the news and getting it right,” said Ip to students and faculty at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication. “At the end of the day, I’m beat.”

Ip said that both writing for the newspaper, and writing for the Journal’s “Real Time Economics” blog, have their plusses and minuses. (Note that Ip blogged Monday from his Chapel Hill hotel room about the theory behind the Nobel Prize winners in economics and the upcoming Fed minutes.)

Writing for the newspaper, said Ip, takes more effort. He recounted a 4-inch story he once wrote that had four editors. “But in the newspaper, you’re trying to tell readers something essential,” he added.

Blogging, said Ip, takes “a lot of effort and my time.” And, he added, “I don’t know how we’re going to make money” with blogging.

Ip also noted that although the Journal’s blogs are original content that is not found in the paper or contains information from other blogs, theer’s only so much information that readers can digest in one day. “The one thing that hasn’t changed is the number of hours in the day to read this stuff.”