Melissa Wantz: Notes from West Egg

One blog I’m following with much interest this week is at this one. It’s a blog being written by a group of 35 high school journalism teachers taking part in an ASNE fellowship in Arizona. I have it on my reader and am really enjoying the news coming out of the conference each day because I will be heading for a 12-day ASNE conference in Columbia, Missouri, in mid-July. The blog is giving me a great perspective on the kinds of training, lectures and activities to expect.

It is interesting to learn that some of the teachers are reluctant bloggers, while others seem quite comfortable. I think those with journalism backgrounds take to blogging more easily, which makes sense. They are used to producing “news” and sharing information.

When I was a reporter, I was given a weekly column (at age 23!) which I wrote for the next ten years. I could write about anything that interested me, and so it was basically blogging but in print. It was prestigious at the time because only a handful of journalists in the newsroom were selected to write a column, and I was certainly the youngest and also the only female.

Now, writing a column for the newspaper has less prestige because the internet has opened the door wide to everyone who wants to speak out. There’s still the matter of finding an audience, of course, and a newspaper helps provide that, but some of the most popular blogs (and profitable ones) are produced by independent writers who came up with a good idea and worked it well. Their publicity grew and they are now media companies in their own right.

The wonder of the internet is that you can write in a tiny niche space and sometimes find a sustainable audience that is unbounded by geography and time. Sometimes when I run across a great blog post, I spend hours going back through the years-old posts on the site before adding the address to my Google reader. You couldn’t do that with a great newspaper column 10 years ago. Blogs live forever.

[Photo credit: "Blogs" by dalequetepego on Flickr]