Personal Websites For Journalists
- Posted by Essays Blog in Essays Blog |
- June 11th, 2009 |
- Comments
Traditionally, journalists have more or less worked alone. Journalists in both the news business and feature writers for magazines typically will develop their stories, dig up their leads, conduct their interviews and draft the final product themselves. In the newspaper business, major stories will sometimes become collaborative efforts where various reporters are employed on aspects of a account and their activity is edited into a single piece, published low multiple bylines.
Communicating with a journalist was generally a haphazard affair, placing a call to a patchboard or desk and leaving a message. Today, major newspapers all have websites and provide email addresses for most of their journalists and nearly all of their columnists. People who compose columns and opinion pieces are generally more open to communicating with the public because their activity is often designed to generate controversy and feedback is important. Occasionally columnists will find ideas for new topics in the email interchange they receive, or will compose about the heavy response they received on a particular piece.
A journalist with any initiative can accept this communications process one block further by background up a personal site. That computer can assist various purposes: all of them require any activity. The function of the computer depends, to any degree, on the amount of time the journalist is choice to devote thereto. A employed reporter may also have to negotiate permission to engage in any online publishing of his own with the editorial body of the paper or magazine that employs him.
Internet blogs have made any opinionated people in this country powerful and advantageously known, just by chastity of their daily journaling. A employed journalist could fix a blog for which he could provide occasional entries, relating to his activity or to other news stories or all dissociated subjects. The duration of a blog is that it provides the opportunity for open dialogue among all who care to log on and participate. Name recognition can be meaningful to any journalists and blogging is one artifact to develop “viral” recognition by inviting communication. Many people will be attracted to the opportunity to communicate with individual who gets paid to publish.
Blogs can develop account lines for topics for journalists, particularly columnists and feature writers. They can help a professional writer build a persona that doesn’t enter into the aboveboard journalism he produces on the job. A personal blog is a artifact to build a public and advantageously rounded profile that the constraints of a conventional journalism job don’t unremarkably allow.
A personal site can also provide the journalist an opportunity to showcase a “profile” of activity that is dissociated to the job, or at least has gone unpublished by the employer. Here again, thither is a fine line between what the journalist can do online - which is essentially public exposure - and what the requirements of exclusivity on the job may be. But if a journalist has ventured into fiction, a personal site is a great artifact to put it out thither for exposure.
If the goal is a publishing opportunity for fictional activity, the site may be a artifact to short the formal compliance rules for fictional activity that magazines and book publishers maintain. An established journalist is already a professional writer. Asking a book publishing editor or potential agent to look at product posted on a site is much easier than engaging in the formal process.