Global PR Blog Week 1.0

Bradley Peniston talks about blogs and their impact on Defense News

Bradley Peniston is Managing Editor of Defense News and author of Around the World with the US Navy.

ALICE MARSHALL: You said you kept a blog in 1998, what was it about and is it still online?

BRADLEY PENISTON: I was on assignment for Navy Times, traveling around the world with the U.S. fleet. I published a daily entry to Navy Times for about two months, trying to keep things a little lighter than my weekly dispatches to the paper. Alas, the posts were lost in the sands of a redesign a few years ago.

ALICE MARSHALL: How have blogs affected the news gathering process at Defense News? Do your correspondents read Riverbend, Kurdo's World and the other Iraqi blogs? I believe some of the soldiers succeeded in keeping blogs; how did that affect your news gathering process? What other, if any, blogs are popular at Defense News?

BRADLEY PENISTON: Some reporters read blogs; others don't. I scan about 60 blogs daily with an RSS newsreader; it helps me catch things that haven't hit the major media yet.

ALICE MARSHALL: How have blogs affected your relationship with your readers?

BRADLEY PENISTON: We don't have public blogs yet (though our librarian keeps one for internal use). We publish on our conventional web site. But we do know that bloggers post links to those stories, which probably boosts the readership.

ALICE MARSHALL: Do readers send you links from blogs?

BRADLEY PENISTON: I haven't received many, but others might.

ALICE MARSHALL: On a less bloggy note, how would you compare your reporting to mainstream news media? Other than the obvious difference of being a trade paper. My memory of your reporting in the summer of 2002 was there was a far more skeptical than broadcast news, other Gannet properties and certainly the New York Times or the Washington Post. Do you remember it the same way?

BRADLEY PENISTON: We report on the business and policy of defense, and pitch our stories at decision makers in government, militaries, and industry in more than 80 countries. We don't try to be more or less skeptical than anyone else; we just try to bring our expertise to bear and report the truth as we find it.

ALICE MARSHALL: I do not ever remember seeing an anonymous source in Defense News or any publication of the Army Times Publishing Co. What is your policy concerning anonymous sources?

BRADLEY PENISTON: We do use them; it would be virtually impossible to cover the military in depth without them. But we try to be very judicious, and push to get our sources to go on the record.

ALICE MARSHALL: Thank you Bradley Peniston