Northwest Indiana Bloggers

[Steve Dalton]

I just posted a longer than normal post on Porter County Politics, called Commenter Question Yesterday Was that lists all our feeds. I'm hoping to encourage some journalists to begin using us as resources for their articles on occasion.

[Chris Hedges]

Hi Steve,

It was great that you inspired Jerry Davich to write about local bloggers.

If you write well and about topics that interest the media, they will eventually come knocking on your door. Abdul in Indianapolis has been on the Fox News Channel because of his blogging. He's also going to be featured on one of the Indianapolis TV station's political blogs (along with Jen Wagner formerly of TDW).

Locally, I was able to contribute to Steve Walsh's program on Vocalo during the election. I need to start writing up some more human interest pieces so I can read them into the computer to make MP3 files so that they can play them on the radio. (I don't think the phone call pieces are played as much because of lesser quality of the phone messages).

Also, if you have something really interesting, you can always send out new releases. The key is to make sure that the item is extremely newsworthy.

[Steve Dalton]

In the next week the most fun "news" is this race for attorney general. I guess I got myself in the middle of a firestorm pitting some statewide bloggers who didn't want the Governor to choose a new AG ... and those of us who felt that Jon Costas was the best choice.

If you think there's a place that I could record something worthwhile, I'm glad to try, I've never done mp3's or videos myself. Want to interview me on the impact of blogs on the political process this year? Just a thought

[Chris Hedges]

Hi Steve,

The easiest way to get audio recorded is to get use a microphone -- I have a $8 mic I got from an office supply store -- to record directly onto your computer. I use the open source (free) program Audacity since it has a lot of powerful options. I also added a plug in so that I can export the audio as a MP3 file needed for Vocalo.

An interview sounds like a good thing as well. It might be interesting to do a story about how blogging is taking off in Northwest Indiana.