Blogging For Journalists / from SreeTips.com

David Carr’s media column on mainstream journalists doing new media projects.

Content may or may not be king, but it’s mighty valuable. Journalists, who know a thing or two about its creation, are beginning to build sites that help them maintain custody of the content and, if all goes well, reap the rewards. Om Malik, a former writer for Business 2.0, has received backing for GigaOM.com, a technology news Web site that has broken a number of stories, and Rafat Ali, the former managing editor of The Silicon Alley Reporter, recently received funding for his company, which publishes PaidContent.org, a site that covers digital media news.

 Read full story:

The New York Times
July 24, 2006

A Sideline That Competes With a Byline
By David Carr
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/24/business/media/24carr.html

THREE QUESTIONS for Cyrus Farivar, tech writer, who blogs at CyrusFarivar.com (“Being a good writer is 3% talent, 97% not being distracted by the Internet”).

1. Why and when did you start to blog?
A. I started a more personal blog on LiveJournal - 
http://cfarivar.livejournal.com/- 2001/12/19/ - that began on December 19, 2001. I started because LiveJournal was something that a lot of my friends were doing and blogging just seemed like a cool
medium. I later switched to Moveable Type - http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~cfarivar/blog - then ultimately to WordPress - http://cyrusfarivar.com -  for the customizability. My LiveJournal still exists, but only as a mirror of the WordPress blog.

2. What have you learned (about your work, journalism or yourself) since you began to blog?
A: As my writing has improved professionally, my blogging style has gotten shorter. In other words, I’m not one of those bloggers who puts significant amount of time or thought into what I blog. I generally have short items and/or excerpts of news articles, without commentary.

3. Should journalists blog?
A: Journalists should blog if they have something to say that they don’t have an outlet for. But don’t blog just for the sake of doing it, or because you want to "expand your brand" or something ridiculous like that. Will blogging necessarily improve your writing or get you a book deal or make you money? Probably not.

Read more Cyrus Farivar at CyrusFarivar.com.