Blogger Rich Hailey was given unfettered access to the Knoxville News-Sentinel newsroom, and he’s blogging about it.

Before I get started, I have to thank Michael Silence for getting me in the doors, and Editor Jack McElroy for allowing me complete access to his newsroom. ‘Go where you want and write whatever you want,’ is what he said to me. We’ll see how serious he was about that when I get back from Vegas and send him an expense report.

He even sat in on budget meetings.

Now, that’s openness and transparency.

At the end, Hailey hits on a theme I’ve hammered on for a few years: Newspaper sites need to be more like blogs:

I talked for quite a while with Jack Lail, Managing Editor/Multimedia about how online newspapers would compete with free news aggregators already out there. His response was that people came to the internet looking for original content, and somebody had to be able to provide it. And as Tom Chester mentioned, one of the things that drew international attention to some of their stories was the frequent updates that kept the story fresh and current.

Original content, frequently updated?

That’s blogging, folks.

And that, it is. (Via Jack Lail)