Brian Williams and MSNBC.com Blog Permalinks

Posted on December 4, 2005

NBC Anchor Brian Williams has been busy blogging at The Daily Nightly on MSNBC.com since his first post on May, 31 2005. William even blogged from inside the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina. Williams has continued to cover Hurricane Katrina while other newspapers and blogs have dropped coverage. Williams says, "We will never forget this story." A new Washingtonpost.com article by Howard Kurtz explains why Williams blogs.

With a packed schedule, why does he spend time blogging? "It lets people in on our editorial process," Williams says. "I take our own folks to task when I think we've failed the evening before. Viewers deserve to know more about our machinations." During President Bush's trip to Latin America last month, Williams wrote that "we dropped the ball" on the president's mixed reception, blaming himself and some of his colleagues.
The blog also gives him a chance to vent. He wrote that setting up an interview with New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin took "hours of planning, cajoling. . . . We've conducted interviews with presidents of the United States with less discussion of camera angles, walking distances, duration, lighting and timing."

Brian Williams is one of the most active anchor bloggers but Technorati doesn't appear to show much link love to The Daily Nightly. This is because the older archives point to a different section of MSNBC.com. The more recent "permalinks" go to http://dailynightly.msnbc.com. Older permalinks go to msnbc.msn.com. Hopefully, MSNBC and other MSM blog publishers will start being more consistent with how they set up blogs and permalinks. It looks like MSNBC has set up a similar link structure for the new Blogging Baghdad blog so maybe they have figured it out.

Update: Jim Ray, the creator/developer of the Daily Nightlog weblog, told us about the new permalink structure at MSNBC: "You're absolutely correct about our permalink situation -- about a month ago, we switched from our standard site publishing tool to a more weblog-centric platform. At the time, the decision was made to keep the old links in place, so as not to break any existing links out there, and continue on with more blog-friendly permalinks."

Updated 12-5-05