Sunny Hundal is a professional journalists as well as being an active online blogger. He has posted over 10,000 blog posts over his time on the web and was voted Guardian Blogger of the year in 2006. Sunny is most commonly known for his online magazine Asians In Media, the magazine aims to tell fresh new stories and tell a British audience about Asian culture which they often know little about.
Sunny highlights the fact that now the majority of online bloggers are no longer journalists, they are in fact every day citizens. Blogs are now so easy to create that it means anyone can voice their opinion and spread news via their own blog. He says this in some respects can make the job of a journalist harder as now there is more competition to make their voice heard.
To make your blog posts stand out from the rest Sunny says you need to come up with something new. You need an angle that hasn’t been approached before and a new story with fresh ideas. By creating something different you’ll instantly stand out from the crowd. But once you have a good post you need to generate traffic, this can be done by hyperlinking, sharing on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter or connecting your blog to other peoples. Sunny says you need to make ‘noise’ to generate traffic to your page.
Sunny thinks that social networking sites have taken the limelight away from online blogs. Twitter is now the most influential social networking platform, a lot of news now breaks via Twitter as celebrity’s, politicians and other influential characters are nearly all posting Tweets regularly, as well as everyday citizens posting their finding and news. Sunny said how newsrooms now employ ‘Twitter Correspondents’ to search through the Twittersphere for fresh news stories.
