I've been writing for AnnArbor.com for more than a year under the title of "Lead Blogger." We weren't sure exactly what that meant when it started, and even though I had been writing regularly about the Ann Arbor area online for more than a decade, it was my first job in journalism. Throughout the whole time, I've been dealing with the existential question: what exactly is blogging, and how does it differ from Journalism with a capital J, and how do the two coexist? What rules are different, which are the same, and how do you compare what you used to do with what you do now?

How are you edited?

I do two kinds of writing for AnnArbor.com. One piece is this daily column, which comes out in the morning and goes through the usual edit cycle. I write it, I submit it to my editor, it emerges and gets published fairly quickly after a check for spelling, grammar, AP style, tone, and consistency with what the rest of the news team is doing. There's a long set of suggestions for search optimization, which sometimes results in changes to the headline or formatting or other details.

Writing on a short deadline does not lend itself to the kind of exhaustive copy editing and fact checking and nuanced attention to fine details of house style and punctuation that are characteristic of The New Yorker, which is famously punctilious. It does mean that someone checks my work before it goes online.

The second kind of writing is in the comments to stories on AnnArbor.com, where I spend about a quarter of my time both reading reader comments and making some of my own. The editorial barrier here is much smaller; every so often my own comments will be moderated out, when I get too far off tangent, but I've learned how to minimize that.

There is a possible third approach, which I haven't taken to yet for lack of a good model: making the better comments into shorter blog entries of their own. When I was writing for myself and not for an editor, that was completely plausible to do; there was infinite space on my own blog, and no worries about bumping a story off the front page because no one was reading it anyway and no editor had to be scheduled to check it. There's a little space between the gravitas of a heavily linked and footnoted daily column, and the offhand paragraph of the comment thread, and I haven't figured out the process that gets writing to neatly fit in that middle space.

Links

• Copy Editing at The New Yorker Magazine. An Interview With Mary Norris from The Red Room discusses "what really goes on at America's most prestigious literary magazine."
• David Remick's Postscript: Miss Gould tells the story of Eleanor Gould, who worked for The New Yorker for 54 years and held the title of Grammarian. "She shaped the language of the magazine, always striving for a kind of Euclidean clarity—transparent, precise, muscular. It was an ideal that seemed to have not only syntactical but moral dimensions."
• Jason Kottke's kottke.org is some ideal that I aspire to, but don't accomplish, as a structure for writing frequent short pieces. His typical entry is a short paragraph of his own, introducing a paragraph or two quoted from the source he references, and another short paragraph at the end. Links are everywhere, and on a good day there might be four or five entries all worth reading.

Do you tell a story piecemeal, or do you assemble everything?

Storytelling in weblog format, where you get four or five tries a day to collect and publish some small part of the thing you are looking to tell a story about, is very different from writing the 600 word daily column. I'll illustrate with some of my ongoing writing about the city's solid waste system, about which former solid waste commissioner Vivienne Armentrout taught me "Waste is a terrible thing to mind."

If you are writing this story piecemeal, then every fragment of news from wherever you collect it about any of the players involved in the story is worth collecting, analyzing, and repeating if it passes the sniff test for accuracy. The blogger in me suppresses the "is this newsworthy" filter, and also the "is this local" filter, and simply starts to collect, process, and dispose of each scrap of possibly relevant information. Only by collecting and publishing these details do you start to understand a broader landscape of what is going on. You end up with something that reads like sludge, but has a rich set of news nutrients in it for future storytelling.

I'll end with four or five relevant pieces of my ongoing understanding of the solid waste and compost system; each of these are too fragmentary to be their own entire story, unless you are going to start the Biosolids Blog and be a pioneer sludgeblogger. None of these are local, in the narrow sense that they refer to a production in progress in the county, yet all touch on some of the issues that the city will need to deal with.

Links

• U.S. Composting Council Invites You to Take Part in the 2011 International Compost Awareness Week Poster Contest. A press release from the US Composting Council, announcing a poster contest. Sponsors include "A-1 Organics, BASF, BioCycle, Cedar Grove Packaging, Chick-fil-A, Chinet/Huhtamaki, City of San Jose, Coca Cola, Composting News, Filtrexx International, GenPak, Mirel Bioplastics, MSW Management Magazine, Plastics Solutions-Ecosafe, Playworld Systems, Resource Recycling, Reotemp Instruments, St. Louis Composting, Starbucks, Stopwaste.org, SunChips, Synagro, Waste Handling Equipment News, WeCare Organics, U.S. EPA Resource Conservation Challenge."
• The U.S. Composting Council is the trade assocation that runs the poster contest mentioned above. It produces a monthly newsletter, with news clippings from issues around its members interests nationwide. The October 2010 issue includes stories about vermicomposting, treated biosolids, and composting of disposable diapers.
• Waste and Recycling News is a trade journal for the industry, published by Crain Communications Inc. If you were going to be a leading sludgeblogger, you'd be reading with interest news like this from Florida: "Department of Environmental Protection amends rules to improve biosolid land application site accountability and management, address growing nutrient concerns, and support public confidence in the beneficial use of biosolids. Rule effective Aug. 29."
• Biosolids debate comes before HRM council is the headline from the CBC News. "A Halifax staff report that argues biosolids — sewage sludge — is a safe fertilizer comes before council Tuesday. Last summer, people complained of a foul odour after the treated human waste was used along Dunbrack Street in Clayton Park. The sludge was also used as a fertilizer for newly planted trees in Point Pleasant Park."
• Somewhat closer to home, the Ishpeming Area Joint Wastewater Treatment Facility has brought on line the first municipal biosolids composting facility in the state. A Marquette Mining Journal report notes that "Michigan's first in-vessel composting system for treating municipal biosolids is now producing an "exceptional quality" soil amendment that meets U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations of being 99 percent pathogen-free."

The City of Ann Arbor's biosolids plan

From 2010 State Revolving Fund Project Plan for the City of Ann Arbor, a document prepared for the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality:

"Through project workshops with Utility Department Staff, a list of twenty-six potential biosolids management alternatives was selected and narrowed to twelve alternatives for further evaluation by the project team. A copy of this plan can be found in Attachment N."

Alas, Attachment N was not included in the document; I've asked for a copy.

Edward Vielmetti wades through municipal biosolids for AnnArbor.com. Contact him at edwardvielmetti@annarbor.com.