:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::
"Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day - 23 minutes - and that's supposed to be enough." -Walter Cronkite, RE TV news. The Web has changed that for many, however, and here is an extra dose for your daily news cocktail. This prescription tends to include surveillance and now war-related links, along with the occasional pop culture junk and whatever else seizes my attention as I scan online news sites.:: 7.18.2003 ::
:: "Blogging for Bucks" ::
From a Wired report:
Journalist Rafat Ali is an unusual beast: a laid-off dot-com reporter who's making money online writing about, well, making money online.
Ali, a former reporter for Inside.com and an editor at the Silicon Alley Reporter, is making a comfortable living as an independent journalist-cum-blogger.
Working out of his East London flat, Ali publishes PaidContent, a one-man trade newsletter about the business of online media.
After six months of publication, Ali has earned as much as he would make in a year as an editor at the Silicon Alley Reporter. And he has just won a prestigious European Online Journalism Award for News Weblog of the Year.
Published daily, Ali's site mixes weblog entries with Ali's original reporting. The site boasts a healthy readership and a full roster of advertisers. Though Ali puts in odd hours (he works on New York time), he doesn't seem too stressed about paying the rent. Wired News asked him by e-mail how he does it.
Q: What are the sources of your income? Is PaidContent your only source of revenue, or do you have a trust fund?
A: Advertising and sponsorships. My newsletter commands premium rates. It goes out now to about 2,500 subscribers daily and (has) about 10,000 pageviews on the site daily. Plus, I estimate about 500 to 700 people get my (site summary) feed. I do not freelance. This is my sole work. And I wish I had a trust fund!
Q: Describe your typical working day.
A: I work U.S. hours. I wake up around 11 a.m. or noon every day. I ferret out the first set of links and then send out the newsletter by about 2 p.m. London time, which is 9 a.m. EST. Then I ... catch up on news outside my work (I read the Guardian and The New York Times online). Then I catch up on e-mail, breaking news if any, and update the site until about 5 p.m. I catch up with friends in London and U.S. on the phone. Then I do the last set of updates on the site. I might call up sources in U.S. on the West Coast. I do that until about 1 or 2 a.m.
However, I do travel a lot, mainly to conferences. In the last three or four months I've been to Germany, Holland, New York City three times, Boston, Spain. I live-blog these conferences as much as possible.
Q: How did PaidContent get started?
A: I started PaidContent.org in June 2002, as a way to raise my profile as a journalist.... I wanted to get out of my Silicon Alley Reporter job, and getting into this area seemed logical.
I kept doing it on the side, and started doing some original stories, which got linked from other places ...
ALSO from the piece:
One thing I guess I was smart about was starting an e-mail newsletter for PaidContent very early on. All the links/stories went into that daily newsletter, which helped solidify my position with the site. And the viral nature of e-mail perhaps helped.
And...
Q: What are the tools of your trade? How do you go about finding/blogging/publishing stories?
A: I am lucky in that I have done freelance Web design, so I'm pretty comfortable with design and technical issues. I use Movable Type, which is very good. I still think pMachine is the best nano-publishing tool but I am too lazy to move from MT to PM.
For blogging, I have my own personal portal of daily sources I go to. I get stories the same way every other journalist does it: working the phone, speaking to contacts, sources in the industry, getting tips.
I do, however, make sure that I get links or stories first, and from many non-obvious sources. As a journalist, I value my neutrality above all else, and then the speed.
Q: Do you work harder as an independent, or is life easier?
A: Harder. If anyone told you life as an independent is easy, well, dream on. If you work for yourself, you're working all the time. But it is the good kind of work, the work you want to wake up to every day.
Q: How do you motivate yourself to post every day?
A: My traffic figures, subscriptions to the newsletter, the e-mails I get. I know people are reading my work and expect it. It has become a social obligation of sorts -- in a very good way.
When I wake up every morning, the two steps I take from my bed to my work table are the best two steps I take -- the best two I have taken in all my life.
posted bye me
:: 9:55:00 AM [+] ::
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