Tag Archives: blogging

On trying not to abandon your blog

Hey, it's the first ever Inverted Soapbox post! Meta meta.

Readers here will notice the flood of posts has dried up to an infrequent drizzle over the past year or so and it’s due in no small part to being Actually Busy with Work That’s Read By More Than Four People. And this is the problem with blogs, the personal kind you start when you’ve got nothing else to do, say you’re maybe a frustrated reporter stuck at a small-town paper writing the same rezoning stories over and over again like some sort of Mac-toting Sisyphus.

So then you find yourself (not complaining at all) in the position of spending 8am-10pm some days in front of the computer writing, posting, editing, reporting, re-editing, pre-posting and working on even more pitches to give yourself even more writing and reporting work, and by the end of the day you’re so dead tired of staring at the computer screen and banging out content that you want to spend your one free hour chugging Trader Joe’s wine and killing an episode or two of Dr. Who. Which is why, if you ever look around the internet, you see lots of withered and abandoned blogs among the recently promoted set of the internet, the folks who had time once to blather away to their little corner of the internet before, you know, a bigger audience might look them up. Suddenly this little webspace that once contained emo ramblings about breaking up with a girl in South Carolina (long-since deleted) or what the iPhone means for the death of the bar argument (still up here somewhere) suddenly might be stumbled upon by someone I’m trying to profile for Inc. (like this guy) or, yikes!, even a potential date (Yes, I know who you are, sometimes. Statcounter is like reverse stalking: stalking the people who are stalking you. Does that count as stalking? Yes, I’m asking you, stalker).  Continue reading

As of press time

A thought hit me as I was banging away at another semi-newsy blog post the other day and purposefully inserting

Press building opening day at Lowcountry newspapers

New multi-million dollar German press for the Island Packet/Beaufort Gazette , built just four years ago! (photo by Jay Karr)

the cheeky anachronism “As of press time..: even in a post-press age, it may still be relevant.

I have no doubt that much of the nomenclature of the old media structure will disappear in time, even as they wear out their comforting nostalgia drives. At some point “stop the presses” will be as much a relic as a linotype machine, despite that we’ve continued to half-seriously scream “stop the presses” even though presses haven’t actually had to be pulled to a grinding halt in decades (it’s not that hard to hit pause on a publishing software system); “copy desk” will probably stick around, as long as (we hope?) there will still be editors somewhere; “rewrite” is gone already; referring to a story in “inches” is sailing off into the sunset (though for some of us, it’s still how the default way to think about story length. Sorry, metric system); “A-matter” and “copy boys” are dead, “putting the paper to bed” is going to sleep, and “tombstoning” sounds more apt to describe the industry than abutting hedes. Good stories will still always have “legs” to me, even if I’m the only one chasing those gams. Continue reading

Fine, I guess I am a Blogger, and other thoughts on the BK Blogs meetup

Brokelyn's Lauren Cannon gets blogged on at The Bell House (photo by jillysp)

New Yorkers, I have come to learn, never really need an overarching excuse to get together, tip a few drinks and be social, whether this be for business negotiations, quiet commiseration or just drunkenly arguing over the added societal value of increased usage of portmanteau (or increausortmanteau).

Yet still, I am, by nature, highly skeptical of organized media events — press briefings, journalism conferences, awards ceremonies, any sort of general charlie foxtrot breaking news situation, and the like.  All these have done little in the past to dissuade the adage of “hell is other journalists,” whether it be from being pestered for breaking news updates from TV reporters too lazy to do their own reporting or trying to get a question in edgewise to Seann William Scott during a roudtable interview when a woman kept pestering his time with non Bulletproof-Monk-related questions related to the anti-drug campaign.

So it is with this trepidation that I went into the BKBlogs event at Bell House last Wednesday night, knowing full well that any event that involved willfully immersing oneself in a sea of bloggerers and twitterers was a recipe for a hot mess of self-promotion stew.

But Brooklyn, as ever, is full of pleasant surprises. Brokelyn was asked to help host this event with Fucked in Park Slope and Brooklyn Based, with no other intended purpose than to get together at a cool bar and network the shit out of each other and see what the faces of those pajama-clad carpal tunnel-rocked wretches of the Brooklyn bloggerati look like.

People responded well to the event, and a few hundred filled the front lounge of the Bell House, far outcrowding the pink-haired, wallet chained, fedora-adorned Cherry Poppin’ Daddies fans (concurrent concert in the back room. And hey, Cherry Poppin’ Daddies are still around! Zoot!). Continue reading