WOS Launches Blogsonstage & Invites Contributors

With our User Reviews, Big Debate surveys and always lively Discussion Forum – not to mention our annual Theatregoers’ Choice Awards – supplementing our extensive in-house generated content of news, reviews, gossip, listings, interviews and other features, Whatsonstage.com has long been a place where theatregoers can not only access but also share information. Today, we’re launching a new service to build on that interactive online community – www.blogsonstage.com.

For the uninitiated, “blog” is short for web log, a form of online personal journal. The term was first coined in the US around 1997. Although early practitioners had to be Internet-literate enough to effectively build and maintain their own web pages, the subsequent launch of online services offering free and easy set-up tools has democratised the practice of blogging. Now hugely popularised, there are literally thousands of blogging sites and portals, including those run by leading search engines such as Google and Yahoo. These attract bloggers from all walks of life expounding on every subject under the sun.

As the title suggests, Blogsonstage.com is a little more focused than that – a dedicated portal for theatre-related blogs. In accepting his Theatregoers’ Choice Award last month for The Woman in White, Best Set Designer William Dudley said: “As Whatsonstage.com continues to grow, I hope it will become an increasingly important forum for our industry which will bring practitioners and audiences closer together.”

Our aim is to do just that by attracting a range of blog contributions from all sides of theatre – playwrights, actors, directors, designers, critics, box office managers, ticket agents etc, and of course, theatregoers. We hope that this proves not only entertaining but also enlightening, so that “practitioners and audiences” alike can learn more from each others’ perspectives and indeed come “closer together”. If it works, the end result could become an exciting living memoir of theatregoing in the UK and around the globe.

It’s earliest days now, but we anticipate that Blogsonstage.com will grow quickly. We launch today with several regular bloggers including: Whatsonstage.com’s own contributing editor Mark Shenton who gives his critic’s “view from the aisle” (and in, one of his inaugural entries, explains the protocol of first night seating allocations); an anonymous, slightly jaded actor who provides an alternative “view from the stage”; a prolific theatregoer who happily pays for all of his own tickets; and a young producer, James Seabright, who details the rocky road to this year’s Edinburgh Festival.

New blogs will be introduced shortly and we are now inviting other applications. Blogs can be written under a pseudonym, but bloggers’ real identities and reasons for anonymity must be cleared by Whatsonstage.com. Once accepted, bloggers will be given their own user name and password for the secure Blogsonstage.com administration system, which allows them total control over their blogs, including frequency of updates as well as adding links, pictures and other features. Even if you don’t want the responsibility of blogging yourself, you can easily get involved – all blogs have inbuilt mechanisms for reader comments and other communication.

If you are professionally involved in theatre and are interested in blogging on the site, please email editorial@whatsonstage.com. All other potential bloggers, please click here and fill in the application form.

– by Terri Paddock