DavePress

Interesting re-post of an article that appeared in the BBC’s in-house magazine Ariel by Rory Cellan-Jones on the issues around the launch of the various blogs written by BBC journalists:

It strikes me the initial concerns were twofold - that nobody would be interested in our blogs so they would be a waste of a correspondent’s effort, and that they would threaten our impartiality. But the blogs have attracted plenty of readers - Robert Peston’s Peston’s Picks gets a million page views a month - and they’ve done that without descending to the opinionated, loudmouthed knockabout which was previously seen as the prerequisite for success in this arena.

What blogging does allow a broadcaster to do is to cover stories that would never make it onto the airwaves, and, in my case, to engage with a different and very knowledgeable audience. Mind you, that’s bound to be a minority audience and the danger is they become a distraction from the job of reaching the mass of licence-fee payers. Alf Hermida suggests that the BBC bloggers need to do even more to have a conversation with these people - I think there are risks in getting too involved.

Are these issues peculiar to the BBC, I wonder, or indeed peculiar to journalism?

The BBC are coming up with guidance on how staff should pronounce the phrase “Web 2.0″. Is it, for example:

• Web two point oh
• Web two point zero
• Web two dot oh
• Web two
• etc etc etc…

I have always been a two point oh kinda guy myself, which puts me in line with most folk. I do think there is a nice simplicity to just web two,  but it misses the essential nerdiness of the extra version number, redundant as it may be.

What’s your preferred pronunciation?