APSE

By Stephanie Loh, Patriot-News staff writer

A report from the Mid-Atlantic Region workshop, held Nov. 14 in Philadelphia:

When Dan Steinberg was first commissioned to start a D.C. sports blog for the Washington Post after the 2006 winter Olympics in Torino, Italy, his first instinct was to use the blog as a home for quirky, unique stories about obscure sports such as underwater polo teams.

He was also determined to stay away from the Redskins, the Nationals, and all the other D.C. pro sports teams.

His rational was that he could never hope to rival the Post’s beat writers’ insider knowledge about these teams, so why compete?

But as Steinberg explained in the early afternoon blogging workshop, he quickly realized that when it comes to successful blogging, you have to play to what the people desire.

“The lesson was that you have to write about what the people are interested in,” said Steinberg, who eventually caved to the powers of popular appeal and now incorporates random nuggets of information about all the D.C. pro sports teams into his popular blog “D.C. Sports Bog” on a regular basis.

After years of trial and error, Steinberg and fellow presenter, Enrico Campitelli Jr., the founder of Philadelphia sports fan site The700level.com, have both built their sports blogs into two of the most popular on the Internet.

Here are some tried and tested blogging tenets that have worked in their favor:

1. Don’t be ashamed of mining other people’s information for your benefit.

Transcribing radio interviews and taking pictures of his TV screen with his Smartphone and then posting those photos on his blog, are two of Steinberg’s success secrets. “There’s a Google advantage to being the first person to list something on the Internet,” Steinberg said.

For instance, when the Washington Nationals showed up for a game against the Florida Marlins in 2009 wearing misspelled jerseys with “Nati/nals” across the chest, Steinberg snapped a pic of his TV with his phone, and posted the shot on his blog. It ended up being the first picture on the gaffe on the Internet, and drove a ton of traffic to his site. Here's the link.

2. Realize that writing for print and blogging are two very different animals.

To be blunt, fluff is OK in the blogosphere. Blogs posts can be shorter, and less substantial than print stories. As Campitelli put it, if you want to get blog traffic, don’t bother showing up at the ballpark because “you’re better off sitting home watching TV and getting screen caps.” Steinberg admitted that it was difficult to buy into blogging at first because there were times where he’d feel as if he wasn't doing any serious journalism. But it’s the nature of the medium. “Sometimes you have to do the cheap stuff to be able to do some of the stuff that you really want to do,” Campitelli said.

3. Photos and video are a blogger’s best friend.

Giant continuous columns of grey text is the best way to guarantee that anyone who randomly chances upon your blog will click away by line No. 2. Be generous with multimedia. Photos – quality is irrelevant – go a long way to draw in your reader, and video serves the same purpose. “That’s what a blog post is supposed to look like,” Steinberg said. “There’s text and an image. That’s what people expect. So try to include an image in every post.”