MP blogger reveals how it's done

An award-winning blogger has refused to be drawn on the exact nature of his art, saying instead that it would be easier to "nail a jellyfish to a blackboard".

The enigmatic answer came at a conference on multimedia journalism training held in Glasgow in December.

Asked to define exactly what a blog was Tom Harris, Labour MP for Glasgow South and author of And Another Thing, said: "Nailing a jellyfish to a black board would be an easier task than defining what a blog is."

A trained journalist and one-time press officer for The Labour Party in Scotland, his writing has been praised as "the best political blog in Westminster and Scotland" by Total Politics magazine.

His frank comments came at the National Council for the Training of Journalists' journalism skills conference held in Hampden Park, Glasgow’s famous football stadium (pictured right) in December.

The Council sets the gold standard for journalism training across the nation and accredits noSWeat's newspaper courses, the only such programmes in central London.

The conference was looking at multimedia journalism qualifications and training in the fast-moving world of on-line reporting including blogs.

Mr Harris, (pictured above on his feet in the House of Commons), said: "It [writing a blog] is more intimate, more personal, in a way you can't be in a newspaper or national newspaper."

But he emphasised the importance of the traditional media.

This was demonstrated in US president, Barak Obama's successful attempt firstly to win the Democratic nomination and then the White House itself in 2008, he claimed.

"[It was a] balanced campaign using media in a new and much larger way than any other campaign. But he used it in order to finance and run a very traditional grass roots campaign," he said.

And he pointed out that anything newsworthy only became public knowledge when it was picked up from the blogs by the mainstream media.

Turning to the forthcoming general election in the UK set for next year Mr Harris said: "It will be an internet election because politicians will be able to rebut instantly."

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