This probably isn't necessary for anyone who regularly reads blogs, so if you're a regular here at Hoystory, you can read the rest of this post with a self-satisfied smirk. I've been writing for quite some time that newspapers don't "get" the new media. Too often when newspapers try to enter the new media arena -- usually first through blogging -- their efforts are akin to a 60-year-old white man doing hip-hop.

So, here's a little instruction on how to do a newsblog if you're a newspaper. A newsblog is a newspaper's way of doing breaking news in the Internet era. Where TV networks break into their regularly scheduled programming when news happens, the newsblog is where the paper puts every bit of breaking news as it happens. The goal is for a paper's newsblog to be the place people go to find out what's going on when five police cars drive down Main Street with sirens blaring and lights flashing. A newsblog is where people go when they drive past a mall and see an area cordoned off with dozens of cops milling around.

The advantage of a newsblog over TV news coverage of a breaking news event is that you don't need to feel obiligated to fill Web space with endless conjecture. Write what you know, even if it isn't much -- it's undoubtedly more than your readers will know.

For example -- and this is a hypothetical that I'm just pulling out of thin air and has no resemblence to anything that has occurred anywhere at anytime (including alternate universes) -- let's say that you drive past a shopping center on your way to work and see a dozen or so police cruisers parked just outside a mall entrance, lights flashing and the entrance blocked off. You make an obligatory phone call to the local police and they tell you only that they're looking for evidence as a part of a routine investigation.

Q: Now, if that's all you've got -- probably not enough for a brief in the next day's paper -- do you sit on it, or do you put it on your paper's newsblog?

A: You put it on the paper's newsblog.

If you want to drive traffic to your paper's Web site and to compete for limited advertising dollars, get the news out there.