First Public Blogging School Opens in Russia

Personally I have never met a certified blogger with a diploma proving their blogging skills and abilities. Not even at geeky parties in the Silicon Valley or meetups in NYC. Probably I have just never asked for a diploma but I suspect that most of my fellow bloggers are self-educated in addition to frequently being self-employed.

Now it looks like I’m in for a chance of actually meeting a properly educated blogger on another side of the ocean as the Russian city of Chelyabinsk (which is way closer to my home Novosibirsk than San Francisco or New York) announces opening of the first blogging school in Russia.

The school will offer 3-months course covering various aspects of blogging, including psychology of internet-based work, text and media content generation, technical aspects of blogging. Full-time and distance online courses will be taught by local bloggers and journalists as well as experts from Moscow and Saint Petersburg with loader voices.

An interesting aspect here is that the school actually happens to be funded by the regional authorities: for some reason they have decided that they need educated bloggers for some of their goals (the goals are not explained – only some declarations of importance of blogging for today’s society are offered). The first group that has already started their studies in the blogging school consists of students and active members of local public organizations for youth. And the education will be free of charge for all of them.

This state-funded not-for-profit nature of the school is particularly interesting because it looks like the authorities in Russia have not only realized the power of social media but have decided to influence it by teaching people to blog properly. And I can’t help but suspect that at least some of the graduates will be invited by those very authorities to blog in public on behalf of some institutions that might need improvement of their image in the eyes of the general public – and in Russia you will hardly find any federal or local government authorities that don’t need exactly that.

I’m not sure if I personally like the idea because it just sounds like journalism disguised under a trendy word and reduced in quality due to time limits and focus on online publishing only. But given that there are plenty of companies in Russia willing to pay people for blogging and other types of generating social media presence on their behalf, it will probably be easier to offer a certificate proving that you have an idea of how to do that instead of quoting the number of personal blog subscribers or Twitter followers – the usual metrics we have relied on and considered valid enough to determine a person’s skills in the online communities. However, it is still hard to grasp how citizen journalism now needs training to be practiced.

Via (in Russian), image credit