Hugh MacLeod is a blogger who draws cartoons on business cards. And/or you can have cards made that feature one of his cartoons. Mine came in today. I can’t tell you how much more fun these are to give out than the official Learfield card.
A couple of years ago my friend Everett asked my advice on a website. He’s a veterinarian and had your basic Web 1.0 site. I suggested he think about a blog because I knew he was a good story teller and would be a natural. And he is.
He often writes about cases he sees in his practice and gets lots of feedback from readers, many of whom have questions.
“Even though I certainly cannot prescribe for a pet that I have not examined, sometimes I can clarify a situation, or make suggestions. Sometimes they just have questions that weren’t addressed in the original post, but are related to the topic. I receive questions from around the country, and even Europe and (today) Tanzania.”
I share this as just one more example of the powerful difference between a blog and the old “brochure” sites that are still all too common. Some day –soon, perhaps– this will not be worth mentioning. Everyone will get it and all or most websites will be blogs or have a strong blog component. I believe this is called the “Duh Moment.”
Everett’s blog is YourPetsBestFriend.com. If you have a pet, it’s a must read.
This is the story of a friend who works in municipal government– we’ll say he’s the city administrator– in a medium size city in… let’s say Vermont. The need for obfuscation will become clear.
The city administrator is unhappy with one of the editorial policies of the local newspaper publisher. (It’s a one paper town) In order to be published, letters to the editor must be signed. But comments on the newspaper website can be anonymous.
Recent comments on one story had gotten kind of personal (toward the administrator). When he complained to the publisher, pointing out the inconsistency of the print and online policy, the publisher explained it was a matter of cross-promoting the two, and readers online expected to be able to share their views anonymously.
I suggested my friend tell his side of the story on his blog. “I really can’t do that,” he explained. “I need the paper’s support in the upcoming annexation vote.”
I’ve never given much thought to the tradition of newspapers endorsing candidates and issues. And I struggle to understand how it’s a good idea. Once the paper takes a position, let’s say “Yes On Annexation,” how can the readers have any confidence in their reporting of the issue going forward?
It seems to me they can wield this kind of power for only as long as they are one of limited sources of news and information in that community.
And if their editorial support for a candidate or issue is pure, how can it be used to intimidate those who call them out in public, on a blog, for example. Seems like you’d have to keep your position secret until the last minute in order to keep folks in line.
If this is the way the game works, I don’t think the public is well served. It’s all about power. Power of those who govern. Power of the media who help them get elected. Where’s the power for the little guy?
I have no idea what will replace the dying newspaper business. But I bet it won’t have this kind of don’t-piss-us-off-or-you’ll-regret-it power. And we’ll see soon enough.
Rebekah Denn has posted links to blogs “and other online works” from other staff members from the former Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper. The list included a number of photographers but the thing that caught my attention was the variety of “beats.”
And that’s probably not a complete list of the positions that went away when the paper folded. My guess is, these folks really knew their stuff. And are good reporters and writers. I hope they find good jobs.
Knowing absolutely nothing about the newspaper business, it’s difficult for me to imagine how any paper could afford have all these. Did the restaurant critic write one story/column a day? How can you make that math work? Is it heresy to suggest the “food writer” also be the “restaurant critic?” Why do you need a “pop music critic” AND a “freelance classical music writer?” “Environmental reporter” and “neighborhood sustainability” reporter?
And I DO understand the same sort of analysis could be done of our business. Or any media business.
I suspect they had all of these niche positions because they could. When the ad dollars were flowing in, why not. Let’s cover everything. But those days are gone.
One final thought. Rebekah’s blog is “Eat All About It: Food, journalism and recipes from the great Northwest.” It’s okay but I’m not sure it’s any better than this one by a former co-worker of mine, Lane McConnell. I suppose Lane is technically an amateur since she doesn’t get paid. And there must be thousands of of these. Probably hundreds in Seattle alone.
When such a wealth of information is just a Google search away, how does a newspaper make the case, “We have the best food stories, read us.”
I think it only worked when they could say, “We are one of only two sources of stories about food in Seattle.”
I’m one of a few hundred (but growing fast) “followers” of Tony Mesenger’s Twitter feed. Tony’s a reporter and columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and covers the Missouri Legislature and state government. He clearly gets Twitter and blogging and makes great use of both.
Tony joined me at the Coffee Zone for an el grande mocha latte doodah where I got him to put down his cell phone for half an hour to talk about his life as a Twitter junkie.
AUDIO: Listen/Download interview MP3
Before going to work for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Tony was a metro columnist and city editor for the Columbia Daily Tribune and the editorial page editor at the Springfield News-Leader.
UPDATE: Thanks to Will Sullivan (Interactive Director or Nerd-in-Chief) for pointing us to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Twitterama page.
I do these from time to time, in spite of how self-serving they seem. That’s never my intention, given the modest traffic through this little alley of the Internet. I’m talking about Google ranking and how well blogs do in this most important metric.
In July of 2006, I posted passage from John Burdett’s second novel, Bangkok Tattoo. The subject –and title of the post– was “Western Concept of Self.”
Today, I happened across the post and decided to Google “western concept of self” (minus the quotation marks). Those are pretty common terms and Goggle returned almost 13 million pages with one or more of them. My little post was number two on that list.
So when clients ask me, how can they get their website to show up on the first page of Google search results, I always tell them the same thing: Start by making your site a blog and update it every day.
“Isn’t there some meta-thingy you can hide on the page that will force my site to the top of the rankings?”
Yeah, maybe. But I’m not your guy for that. I love that Google almost always helps me find what I’m looking for and I’m not keen on helping someone game the system. Even for money. (God, I hope I don’t get hammered by all the SEO experts. Can I just stipulate that you guys are right and I’m wrong?)
One final point and it has to do with blogs vs. newsletters. I’ve posted on this in the past. It came up again recently. The “village elders” of a local organization were unhappy with the blog one of their members maintains for them. They didn’t like having frequent, short items and wanted to go back to their “newsletter” format. Save up any news and post it all, once a month, at the same time.
Nothing wrong with that approach if you’re only interested in reaching the people who are already in the organization and know to go check the website once a month. But if you’re trying to reach more and new people, you want that Google juice. Blogs deliver. Newsletters… not so much.
Dave Winer says he’s made more than $2 million with his blog over the last 12 years. And he’s never put a single ad on it. He explains how this came to be –and the role of a blog– in this excellent post:
“…it’s a way of communicating what you’re doing. Companies, consultants and authors need to do a lot of communicating, and blogs allow you to go direct, and be more efficient, less diluted. People get a real feel for who you are and how you think and what you’re like as a person. Why would I ever let someone else hitch their “message” on this — it would get in the way of me making money!
If I had any advice to offer it’s this — get in the habit of communicating directly with the people you want to influence. Don’t charge them to read it and don’t let others interfere with your communication. Talk through your blog as you would talk face to face. You’d never stop mid-sentence and say “But first a word from my sponsor!” — so don’t do that on your blog either. I can’t promise you’ll make any money from your blog, and I think the more you try the less chance you have. Make a good product and listen to your customers to make it better, and use the tools to communicate, and you may well make money from the whole thing. To expect the blog alone to pay your bills is to misunderstand what a blog can do.”
If you’re a blogger or think you might ever be, this post is worth a read.
Suppose you had a friend that was really smart and funny, and that friend got to cover and live-blog White House press briefings that you could watch “with” her (on C-SPAN) and chat back and forth. Does that sound like something you might be interested in?
Okay, Ana Marie Cox isn’t a friend of mine but she feels like one. I’m one of her legion of fans that go back to the Wonkette days. She now works for Air America.
I don’t know if this is journalism or not and I don’t care. In the same way I don’t care what you call The Daily Show. I call it fun and interesting.
I think of this as the MST3K effect. Even a boring press conference is fun if you’re watching it “with” fun people.
Every year on this date I pause to recall that it was way back in 2002 that I began blogging. Like many others, I was posting little rants on my website before we had the tools and the name, but this is the date I started “writing some stuff down.”
That post was a long quote from Carl Hiaasen’s novel, Basket Case. He described two types of journalists and alluded to the “slow-strangling dailies,” a number of which have finally strangled in the last year or so.
On the 4th anniversary of this blog I met some friends and had four beers. I’m afraid 7 beers would put me out of commission for several days, so we won’t do that.
Another thing I used to do was browse back through the earlier posts but with 4,000+ that is no longer practical. So this post will serve as another scratch on blog wall.
“Every day, 350,00 babies are born at risk of not knowing that Bob Barker was the host of The Price is Right. Pop Literate is dedicated to doing something about that.
This is a place for you to find parenting tools you need to turn out healthy, well-adjusted children. Children who won’t be shunned by their peers because they believe David Copperfield is only a Charles Dickens character.”
The blog died long ago, alas. A good idea.