Robb Montgomery

Adrián Alvarez is working on a special report for Area 11 (SND’s Spanish-language newsletter) about visual editing blogs and bloggers. He is interviewing bloggers from 15 countries - so this should be an really interesting read!
Here are the questions and my responses. I can’t wait to read the special report to see what others are doing.

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Why build a visual journalism blog?
One of the things that Visual Editors provides is blogs for visual editors who blog from India, the U.K., the U.S. and Mexico. VizEds is particularly interested in supporting visual editors who will blog for VizEds from Australia/Oceania, Asia, the Middle East, Africa Europe, and Latin America. Visual Editors provides these highly-read blogs at no cost.

Best Experience as a blogger?
Learning that serving a tightly-focused audience is very rewarding. Blogging provides a mass reach with the opportunity for a personal touch. That’s the part that got me hooked - feedback with a purpose builds a rapport.

Blog traffic?
Visual Editors serves hard to reach editorial executives and creative leaders in newsrooms around the world several times a day and they consume a lot of content. For April, 2007 Visual Editors served 60,218 Unique users and 154,363 total users who viewed an average of over 12 pages per visit.

Why should we read the blog?
Come to learn, come to debate and come to share. Visual Editors is incorporated as a public charity and is organized around the Socratic principle for scholarly debates.

Offer original content?
All of the content on VizEds is user-generated. The critiques, the forum posts, the blog entries - the posting policies, the moderators - all of it comes from the members.

VizEds is all volunteer and the content is of pretty high quality given the resources we are working with. No doubt the best resource we have is the trust of professional and student journalists who consider themselves life learners and like to teach and share.

Interactivity for users?
The interactivity is extremely high given the current percentages for interactivity on social networks.
This probably could be higher if we allowed unregistered and anonymous posts - but we don’t because our members prefer a higher standard for the discourse.

The interactivity also strains our Web server resources as we have had to upgrade to more robust and more expensive servers to keep up with the dynamic content needs. That’s always the true gauge of interactivity - does the audience’s love crash your server?

Other blogs you like?
Visual Mente is good but I wonder if the babel fish translates it always with the right inflection?
I also like Angela Grant’s video journalism blog.
I find it is always the individual blog vs the corporate or group blog that is the most useful and noteworthy.