Dan Steinberg, Washington Post Staff Writer and Author of "The Sports Bog"

You think you write under pressure?  Try writing eight or nine stories each day.

Dan Steinberg writes those eight or nine stories each day for one of the most popular blogs on the Washington Post website, called The Sports Bog (no, that's not a typo).  That keeps him busy.  But he also writes four 600-word stories a week for the second page of the Post's print sports section. That keeps him really busy.

I wanted to talk to Steinberg because I was interested in the difference between a professional blogger like Steinberg (that is, one who blogs for a news organization) and someone who writes strictly for print. Bloggers like Steinberg who write for a news organization have writing processes that never stop: even though they are not composing all the time, they spend a lot of time in the invention stage, looking for topics and researching them.  At first blush, you might think they have it easy, since they have don't have deadlines like print writers do.  On the other hand, the reason why they don't have deadlines is because all they do is write: you can't have a deadline when your writing never stops.  

I also wanted to discuss readers' expectations for blog posts. Does the fact that it's a blog post--and thus often written quickly--mean we should excuse lackluster quality with the qualifier that "it's just a blog post"?  (I should point out that Steinberg does not suffer from lackluster quality.) Steinberg told me that, on the blog, there aren't many posts that he would be proud to send to his college English professor.  But if that's true, I would add that it's a reflection of the relentless blogosphere environment in which they are written, not of their quality.

So read my interview with Dan Steinberg.  You'll learn about his thoughts on the pyramid structure, what happened when he covered the Super Bowl, and what would happen if Barack Obama read his blog. 

photo by Chris Leaman