Colin Randall’s new blog

Posted by Martin Stabe on 25 October 2006 at 10:55
Tags: Blogs, Daily Telegraph, Journalism, Telegraph.co.uk

Rick Waghorn, the Norwich football corresponent who started his own website after being made redundant by the Norwich Evening News, recently suggested to me that any journalist who has made enough of a name for themself as an individual brand would be well-positioned to follow his lead.

One ideal candidate, Waghorn suggested, would be Colin Randall, the former Daily Telegraph Paris correspondent who was made redundant last month despite earlier being celebrated as an example of a traditional Telegraph reporter who had established a strong personal following for his blogging.

And what’s this? The current Private Eye notes Randall has started a new blog.

Randall is certainly well-positioned to make good use of the medium.

He understood how blogging can benefit a newspaper correspondent better than most journalists. In July, sources he developed by blogging allowed him to break the story of the sacking of France-based British blogger La Petite Anglaise.

“I’m an old-fashioned newspaper hack and I’ve come to blogging late in life, but I’ve tried, like all the other foreign correspondents at the Daily Telegraph, to enter into the spirit of things and do it with a fair amount of enthusiasm,” Randall told me at the time of his scoop.

He described blogging as “part of the armoury of the journalist of today” and said that about a dozen French blogs were part of his routine reading.

“I regard anything that moves as a potential news source, so I’m looking at the French newspapers, magazines, TV, radio and if I come across someone’s blog in France, I’ll read that,” he said.

Randall also understands the changing relationship between journalists and their audience, and is respectful of those who shaped the blogging subculture before the big media types showed up.

He said: “I always take the view that the reporter who blogs, although he’s regarded as a professional, is really the amateur in this field. It’s the amateur bloggers who are the true professionals. They know what they’re doing; they know how to link with each other.”

And the increasing reader interaction that blogs brings is also not alien to Randall.

Under former Telegraph editor Max Hastings, Randall said, it had been considered a “black mark offence” if a reader complained that a reporter had failed to reply to a letter: “It was instilled in the editorial psyche in Max’s regime that if a reader took the trouble to write, you took the trouble to reply. But today, when you get 30 or 80 replies to each posting, you cannot stay sane and reply to each of them. You end up replying very selectively.”

Although the blog added significantly to his workload as a Telegraph correspondent, Randall began feeling an obligation to his blog readers to continue posting. After returning from a two-week summer holiday, he said he felt “duty bound” to write a blog post.

He said: “I felt out of a sense of duty not just to the paper but to what becomes part of your readership. People look to you, they expect it, so it can take over your life. The trick is to resist that.”

For the Telegraph, Randall tended to blog whimsical items to that he thought “have no chance of getting into the paper” or to elaborate upon stories he has written for the main site.

He said: “There is this rather uneasy developing relationship between print and new media where we’re being encouraged to write blogs — but what do you reserve for the blog and what do you keep back for the paper?”

An independent Colin Randall blog, perhaps freed from those considerations, will be a welcome addition to the blogosphere; the Telegraph may still come to regret its decision.