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Although I don’t know one word of Japanese, I did get an article published in the April 9th Edition of Fuji Sankei Business-i newspaper, which is being circulated to 200,000 readers a day nationwide. This is how it happened.

At the end of last March, I received an email from Masaru Ikeda. He’s running a system integration company in Tokyo and writes a weekly column about Internet innovations for the Sankei Newspaper. Masaru mailed me that he’d love to come to the Next Web Conference - which my partners from The Next Web Blog organized - but he had to stay in Tokyo for “business reasons”. Therefore, he asked me to write a column that he would translate in Japanese. And so it happened. It wrote the story, Masaru translated it, and he was so kind to sent me some copies.

But that’s not the end of it. Our overseas journalistic adventure ended with a grand finale in San Fransisco last week, where we met during Web 2.0 Expo. At moments like these, I take every word from McLuhan’s Global Village for granted.

Everyday I highlight an article worth reading for bloggers and web-savvies, have look at the archive here

Six Months In, And 600 Posts Later . . . The Worlds Of Blogging and Journalism Collide (In My Brain)

Today’s article is written by Erick Schonfeld, co-editor of world’s largest tech blog TechCrunch. Erick has one impressive track record, since he has been covering startups and technology news for 14 years. He ran the main blog of Business 2.0 (50,000 RSS readers), won several prizes, made it to the TJFR Business News Reporter’s list of the “best and brightest financial journalists under the age of 30” twice and graduated magna cum laude from Cornell University in 1993.

He has been blogging for TechCrunch for six monhts now, and celebrated that fact with an insightful post about TechCrunch and his blogging experiences:

The journalist in me has been avoiding this post (too navel-gazing, too self-absorbed), but the blogger in me can’t help it. Media is changing—how it is produced and how it is consumed. The worlds of blogging and journalism are colliding and I want to get some thoughts down on this transition before I forget what the old world was like or feel too comfortable in the new one.

He then continues describing the growing influence of blogs, his 24/7 addiction to blogging, and the mantra of the TechCrunch crew: “We live or die by how fast we can post after a story breaks, if we can’t break it ourselves”. A must-read for every (tech)blogger.

• Read the article on www.techcrunch.com

I use Fleck, Google Reader, Twitter, and Delicious. So that basically means I’m sharing loads of articles everyday. Yet I have the feeling, no, I’m sure, that most of these links get lost in the overwhelming amount of social bookmarks and Twitter updates. And yes, that fine. Except when it comes to those posts that have a little something extra. Posts every blogger or web-savvy should read. From now on I’ll highlight these posts on a daily basis. Here we go, no. 1, tipped by Edial Dekker.

Ten Basic New Media Skills Journalists Need To Know

Tom Foremski, a former IT journalist and and Silicon Valley columnist for the Financial Times, blogs on the Silicon Valley Watcher about the business and culture of the Valley. Besides the post I’m highlighting here, his about page is also worth your attention.

Foremski sums up ten basic skills for journalists, because ‘most traditional journalists can barely type (..) but they know how to create compelling media and are able to do it consistently’. The striking thing about this list is that the skills are really basic for experienced bloggers. Yet we - the bloggers - tend to forget that. So next time we complain about the lack of journalists in the blogosphere, we might think about improving accessibility. What about a New Media Skills Volunteer Group?

• Read the article on www.siliconvalleywatcher.com

Update: Tim Overdiek, correspondent in London for the NOS Dutch public broadcasting posted two interesting updates on Twitter in reply to this post:

overdiek @dutchproblogger Don’t fully agree w/him. I prefer a journalist who can’t type but can tell a good story. Let others help the poor bastard. (about 18 hours ago)

overdiek @dutchproblogger But of course I love the top ten. (Although confession: Can’t do them all.) (about 18 hours ago)

Overdiek is a blog evangelist and even convinced some famous Dutch news anchors to start blogging. I admire his work yet I don’t agree with him on this. Shouldn’t we redefine the definition of a journalist? Just like a chiropractor has to learn new techniques, journalists should as well.

Times are changing, people have less attention and ask for a different kind of reporting (with deeplinking and all), so journalists have to adapt to these new needs. What do you think?