Entries Tagged 'Weblogs' ↓

My friend Craig Silverman has written a post with some great advice for freelance journalists trying to develop their career in difficult economic times: Freelancing the future. He came to this in response to a post by Adrian Monck, who has been making the case recently that journalism is not at fault for the decline in newspapers.

Monck is almost certainly right, and Craig’s advice is really good advice - not just for freelance journalists but for any independent consultant-type person trying to get things going. But it’s the business side of the news media business that has and continues to screw everything up, IMO. When the net came along, they said, “look, blogs are great, everyone wants more opinion and context” and went ahead and gutted their news reporting function in favour of more opinion, more columnists, more of what the blogosphere was doing very well from it’s inception.

The problem is - that was the exact opposite of the bet they should have made. Opinions are like noses - everyone has one - and no one gives a damn if it’s some “journalist” (whose publisher likely sold him/her out long ago) who has written the opinion piece. On any conceivable subject, I can go out into the blogs and find at least one if not a dozen writers with more experience, more context, and more knowledge about a subject than any journalist has.

What we need - and by “we” I mean society at large - is honest, exhaustive, factual reporting. Newspapers should have (and should be) increasing their reporting budgets and decreasing their spend on columnists and opinions. I do want more opinion and context - but the last place I want to go to get it is a newspaper.

Journalist Mark Glaser, host and editor of MediaShift, has published a fantastic post: Traditional Media Ready to Elevate the Conversation Online. It’s all about how the so-called mainstream media has been trying to adapt to a media environment in which discussion and audience commentary is ubiquitous. It turns out there is starting to be a bit of a consensus around best practices, though these are far from universal yet.

the fourth anniversary of mikel.org and over eight years of publishing a personal site of some kind. Whew - it’s a lot of words.

As of today I’ve switched over to Movable Type to manage this site. I think everything is working properly, and all old links to posts should still be valid. There are still some small changes to make, but the big work is done.

Jon Udell’s Telling A Story - The Weblog as a Project-Management Tool through calebos.org and CamWorld in the past couple of days, and as was the case with both of them, I found the article very compelling. I’ve frankly had enough of talking and thinking about grand schemes of leveraging heavy tech in the service of getting things done. It’s far preferable, to me, to bring things to the basic level: email and a simple website. Much more than that is overkill, and mitigates against adoption of whatever tool is under consideration - which makes it (whatever “it” might be) a no-go. As the article says so clearly, the tools are secondary, and I will add, boring. It’s the work, and more importantly the people doing the work, that are important. And the quickest, easiest possible way to help that happen is the best way to try. That’s the hidden power of weblogs for personal publishing and in this context, I think.