It’s a great question - one that San Antonio Current editor Elaine Wolff [profile] answered adroitly in an AAN listserv discussion today. An AAN staffer asked - What’s the point of a newspaper producing a blog? Isn’t this just daily content written by people who write for the weekly? Are we just calling these “blogs” because sometimes we are using common blogging software packages?

Wolff replied in part:

“[…] We’re appropriating the word [blog] to communicate to readers that it’s an open forum for their input - more a conversation than a one-way flow of information. The next step is to make our software actually reflect that.”

So, call it a blog, call it daily content written for a media company that publishes a weekly - what’s really important is that we’re now in the business of conversations.

[Full disclosure: I worked with Wolff at the Current in 2004.]