Workshop: Should journalists blog?

In Canada, so far, this seems to be pretty much your decision. So far as I know, no news organizations have any formal policy on their staffers blogging. None forbid it. None require it of their staff and are willing to pay them for it or make it part of their daily routine.
So this will be up to you. Does it pay? No. In fact, I would suggest that, for freelancers, it might take away from time you could be spending writing things that do pay. Still, some freelancers blog if only because they enjoy the form.
So if you're going to blog, it's going to be on your own, it seems to me, with your own tools, your own sense of what makes good content and what doesn't.
Some thoughts about this issue:
John Markoff, San Francisco-based technology reporter for The New York Times, interviewed by Adam Clayton Powell III in an article in the Online Journalism Review:

[Powell] …A really central concern of a lot of people – over the last 10 years, if not longer –  particularly among journalists who, I guess you could say, are more traditional, who look ahead and see all these pitfalls that are coming — of people who suddenly start creating content who don't have the same standards as, well, The New York Times. Do you see that as an issue or are we beyond that now?
[Markoff] Well, I'm of two minds. I certainly can see that scenario, where all these new technologies may only be good enough to destroy all the old standards but not create something better to replace them with. I think that's certainly one scenario. The other possibility right now – it sometimes seems we have a world full of bloggers and that blogging is the future of journalism, or at least that's what the bloggers argue, and to my mind, it's not clear yet whether blogging is anything more than CB radio.
And, you know, give it five or 10 years and see if any institutions emerge out of it. It's possible that in the end there may be some small subset of people who find a livelihood out of it and that the rest of the people will find that, you know, keeping their diaries online is not the most useful thing to with their time.
When I tell that to people … they get very angry with me. … I also like to tell them, when they (ask) when I'm going to start a blog, and then, 'Oh, I already have a blog, it's www.nytimes.com, don't you read it?'

Here's a comment from a journalism school instructor who is a friend of mine:

I think the issue of starting your own blog is a complicated one for journalists (we talked a lot about this in my online class).
Does the blog represent part of the work the reporter does for the paper? Or TV station?
Is it entirely personal and if so, can the blogger reveal personal views and biases and still operate as a reporter?
What goes on the blog? Rumour you can't publish but want to get out? Is that fair?
All of this makes blogging pretty controversial for the professional journalist.

Steve Outing had a column in Editor and Publisher on this issue. (You have to register for E&P so I've made a PDF of this column and you can download it here.)

When Journalists Blog, Editors Get Nervous
Personal Web logs are becoming a contentious issue in newsrooms across the country.
Outside of the news industry, bloggers are an opinionated bunch.
Typically they write independently; they're usually unedited, unfiltered voices. Controversy is considered to be a good thing in the land of blogs. But what happens when professional journalists enter this often contentious world? In many cases, their employers get uncomfortable. In a few cases, reporters have been fired or punished because of their personal blogs. A Houston Chronicle reporter a couple of years ago was fired after his employer learned he was writing an anonymous blog that offered often scathing commentary on the people he covered as a suburban-government reporter. Last year, a Hartford (Conn.) Courant columnist who was demoted to travel editor decided to continue his opinion columns in a personal blog, but Courant editors told him to shut it down.
Personal employee blogs, it seems, are land mines for media employers.
The nature of the Internet is why. A simple family blog written by a reporter might contain a reference to trouble at work, or discontent with a boss. It's so easy for such an item — meant for a tiny group but accessible by the entire Web world — to take on a life of its own and spread to a huge audience, embarrassing not only the employer but also the employee. The media operates in a Google-driven, Romenesko world now.

Novelist William Gibson set up and ran a blog for a time, mostly, it seems to talk about his most recent books Pattern Recognition and the subsequent book tour. But after a while, he decided to abandon the blog:

I’ve found blogging to be a low-impact activity, mildly narcotic and mostly quite convivial, but the thing I’ve most enjoyed about it is how it never fails to underline the fact that if I’m doing this I’m definitely not writing a novel – that is, if I’m still blogging, I’m definitely still on vacation.