My modest career achievements are a direct result of blogging. Ever since I started Spotlight Effect in October 2006, blogging gave me one great opportunity after another. From traveling the world with geeky rockstars to starting a news blog for my favorite newspaper. So why are my friends, family and I so excited about my first article in print which was published today? I’m a blogger for crying out loud, embracing the future of publishing. Why bother with paper? Doesn’t that represent a dying breed?
Writer Janine Warner wrote a couple of books about the Internet and journalism. She recognizes the very same phenomenon that I’ve just described. At the International Symposium on Online Journalism, Warner said: ,,journalism students still dream about their name in the byline of a newspaper article. That’s the moment you’ve made it as a journalist. Even for me, it’s sometime hard to take Internet journalism seriously.”
What Warner wants from students is an entrepreneurial spirit. She encourages students to find their own publishing channels and to start building their networks. That’s where blogging comes into play.
Blogging meant the beginning of my network. I interviewed my journalistic heroes for Spotlight Effect, chatted with web celebs who knew my blog The Next Web and commented on articles written by people I admired. Thanks to my rather unusual name, some folks remembered my name. One of them happened to be Hans Nijenhuis, who hired me for nrc.next.
The Eye of the Storm. Photo: Flickr / Tim Caynes
Thanks to blogging, I was introduced in journalism heaven. I’ve written about the journalistic skills I’ve learned at nrc.next earlier, and I think it’s fair to say that those experienced journalists made me a better blogger. Even though they had little or no experience with blogs. They’ve taught me the basics of researching and writing good articles.
So now that I’ve used the traditional journalism techniques for blogging, I might as well share some information about the digital revolution on paper. That’s why I wrote a newspaper article about digital nomads, for which I interviewed TechCrunch’s Mike Butcher, WordPress’ Matt Mullenweg and writer Paul Carr.
The big picture here: it’s incredibly important for journalists to train bloggers and for bloggers to inform journalists about the changes we’re going through.
- Journalists are the professionals who have the channels with thousands of followers and know how to produce great content
- Bloggers understand the shift in publishing and have an entrepreneurial spirit
How exciting is it when you combine that? Dan – fake Steve Jobs – Lyons already gave the answer during the Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco conference in April 2008, he said:
We, the Web 2.0 attendees, are in the eye of the storm. No, we’re creating the storm. [..] A beautiful media future is lying ahead of us. We’ve built a strong foundation for the online dream, and it will get better when the big media companies jump in.
US newspapers are dying, now it’s time for us to come up with exciting solutions. Let’s forge forces.
As a journalist, and now a blogger, I can relate to this. I can also identify with your heartfelt cry: why does a print byline get more status than one on the internet?
So it is with me. I am in love with the web…but dream of a newspaper column. Is it my conditioning? Or the tangible nature of a publication? Or because print tends to pay? (no one pays me for blogging…yet). Or is the web TOO democratic, too accessible, so a web-precense is not a big deal?
I am really interested in what people think.
For me it’s not the money-thing, as blogging is my job. Yet you could be right that it has to do something with the lack of publication barriers. You can just go and write something for a blog. So why should YOU be proud of it. Anyone can do it…
(of course this is not true, since it’s about quality. Yet I’m afraid that we unconsciously think this)