Tag Archives: blogging

Do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded blogger?

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I don’t generally blog about my personal life here, unless it’s in the service of a larger point (or if I meet a member of The Faces). But this week I’m taking part in something that allows me to talk about a couple things that I’ve been looking for an excuse to discuss.

Next week, I’ll be getting married. So, of course, my fiancee Erin and I started a website about it: scottanderingetmarried.wordpress.com*. I explain the reasons why we did this on the site so I won’t re-iterate them, but suffice it to say doing this allows people who won’t be at the wedding (which is everybody) a way to experience it, while still allowing us the freedom to focus on the two of us coming together in marriage. I think having the site actually enhances that. There are two ways to really understand something: teach it to someone else or write about it.

This isn’t a new idea. Plenty of people have wedding websites, though most of them document the events up to the day of the wedding, not necessarily the day itself. Still, I’m sure there are people out there who have taken this idea much farther than we intend to. Yes, we’ll be Twittering throughout the weekend; no, we won’t be Twittering during the ceremony; and no, we won’t be streaming it live. We’ll leave that spectacle to someone else. Maybe Julia Allison** once that dear girl settles down.

For me, this is the last garrison to fall in my efforts to limit the amount of “me” that’s out on the Internet. I wrote about this last year when Erin and I decided to stop keeping details of our relationship off her blog. Most of you know that, in addition to being a published author, Erin has quite the following online. A lot of wonderful things have happened for her as a result, but a few not-so-wonderful things have as well. Knowing how difficult relationships are in the first place, I didn’t want to invite scrutiny or criticism of us by making that part of our life public.

As Erin pointed out to me, part of who she is involves writing about her personal life. And if I was going to be in a relationship with her, I knew I needed to accept that. But Erin’s also never been the type to take a warts-and-all approach, so generally it’s the good stuff that makes it onto ejshea.com, not the rough stuff. In the year or so since my relationship with Erin has been online, I haven’t found occasion to regret it, and I’ve been the recipient of some lovely comments from her peeps.

Regardless, I don’t see myself following her lead. I’m quite happy with this blog being about issues of culture, rather than all the wonderful things that happen day-to-day with Erin (and our dog). Still, I’m enjoying the change of subject.

It would have seemed like an obvious omission to not mention our wedding site here, especially since I often write about online culture. As I’ve said, if you do what I do for a living, it’s pretty much impossible to not leave a big digital footprint. And with Facebook et al., even the stuff you did ten years ago is out there for public consumption, nevermind the stuff you did ten days ago. So it’s best if you embrace it and learn how work with it, as working against it is futile.

* If you want to set up a quickie blog-based website, and want maximum flexibility in working with various “Web 2.0” widgets, avoid WordPress like the plague. You can’t add a Twitter badge (the RSS version of Twitter feeds looks like ass) and I couldn’t embed an Imeem playlist. Yes, the layout is clean and sharp. But almost everything we’ve tried to add, aside from a Flickr badge, has been a major pain in the ass. Maybe this changes if you use a local install or spring for the customizable CSS, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that the cheapest, easiest solution is still Blogger.
** Am I the only person who didn’t know she was from Wilmette? Man, that really explains a lot.

Just because it's online, doesn't make it journalism

Internet,

There’s a lot more going on with Alana Taylor’s post at MediaShift than I have time to get into here, but this post by the PBS ombudsman deals with some of it (even as it utilizes possibly the least essential subheds ever). There’s still a lot of bias against reporting news online in academia, mostly due to ignorance. So I admire Taylor for the futurist that she is.

But in pointing out the speck of wood in NYU’s eye, she fails to notice the plank in her own. In this post, she says: “These days anyone who has access to the internet is, in fact, a journalist because they are inputting information that — for someone, somewhere — is newsworthy.”

What she should have said was this:

“These days anyone who has access to the internet has the potential to be a journalist because they are inputting information that — for someone, somewhere — could be newsworthy, provided it’s reported in a way that has journalistic context.”

Re-reading Taylor’s original post about her class and using Pew Research Center’s guidelines for journalism, it’s pretty clear her post fails on points 3 and 4, even as it succeeds on others.

I’m not one of those people who thinks blogs or online reviews are damaging journalism – the two can co-exist peacefully – but journalism isn’t just publishing information that may be of interest to other people. It’s also about doing right by the subjects of your reportage. Had Taylor published her story on her own blog, she’d have been free to exercise her opinion however she likes. But in the same way that putting on a cape doesn’t make me a superhero, publishing something online (or even on MediaShift) doesn’t make it journalism.

Puzzlement

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I’ve been meaning to write about this post from Merlin at 43 Folders for a couple weeks now. In part, because I think it’s a great outline for how to find a voice and throughline for your own blog, but also because it helped crystallize a few things about what I’m trying to do here.

Despite what the timestamps on this blog say, I started OMIC in 2005. And then promptly abandoned it until 2007. At that time, I felt I needed an outlet for topics I wanted to address that weren’t appropriate for the TOC blog, though the line between the two is often blurred. (This week is a good example of that blurriness as my obsession with ChuffPo has led to posts here and at the TOC blog, including this week’s screed on one of the worst posts I’ve ever read anywhere).

I’ve had some fits and starts with projects here. The Living in Oblivion series (which started as a form of writing discipline and quickly became more a burden than I intended) and the 25 in 12 posts (which I abandoned because I couldn’t quite figure out what I wanted to say in them) to name two. Both failed because I didn’t allow them to be fluid, they were too tied into expectations (my own) and a sense of what they were Supposed To Be.

And that’s something that’s been holding me back here: a notion of what this blog is Supposed To Be, rather than just Letting It Be. It’s why this was a dead blog for two years. It was as if I was staring at 1000 puzzle pieces and trying to figure out what picture they formed, instead of just picking up a couple of those pieces and seeing how they fit together.

All this is a long-winded way of saying I think I’ve finally been able to figure out how to properly curate this thing. These are ideas that have been bubbling around in my head for a little while and Merlin’s post – not all of it, but some – helped crystallize that for me.

You may have noticed that I’ve been writing a lot about social media and the Web. It’s a passion for me right now, and there’s lots to talk about as there are lots of people doing it right and lots of people doing it wrong (ahem, AMC). That will continue here. But I’ve also got more to say about my non-work-related interests like books and music.

Rather than restricting myself or creating a structure, I’m just going to start with a few pieces at a time, and see how they fit together. So forgive me if this post seems to be telling only half the story about what’s next. But think of it like “Something’s Coming” from West Side Story in that it’s pretty much what you’ve come to expect prior, but still signals some interesting developments in the next act.

On fooling some of the people some of the time

Internet,

By now, I’m sure you’re aware of the little prank TOC pulled on Chicago last week. Some crab-asses protested by saying “It’s not April 1st!” But since this issue fell on April 1, we had little choice but to go with the joke a little early, and I think it worked better that way as it caught so many people off-guard and really helped to “sell” the joke. We even extended it to the blog that day, with a whole series of fake posts from Trump as well as some music, film and comedy “news.”

Here’s the “problem” with all this though: the internet knows no calendar. This stuff is going to stay up in perpetuity without the benefit of context. I’m enormously pleased that a few other lazy sites picked up our blog “scoops” and reported them as actual news (seriously, does “Shane ‘Handsy’ Butterscotch” sound like a real name to anybody?) and that on Wednesday we gave the home page a Trump-centric makeover. So I wouldn’t change how we rolled things out online. But there’s a decent argument to be made for making sure that six months from now, people know we didn’t really give Sixteen an 11-star review, James Lipton didn’t actually review Wicked for us and we acted like jerks during David Schwimmer’s interview for a reason.

In the past year, I’ve worked really hard – as has the rest of the staff – to establish TOC‘s bona fides online. We still have a ways to go, but we’re now seen as a trusted source for news just like other sites. And when sites like ours play jokes on April 1, we’ve got cover for our editorial integrity. But if we report that Vampire Weekend is starting a preppie clothing line on March 26 does that end up hurting us in the long run? I’m inclined to say no, especially when we led the day on the blog with stuff like this. But again: we had the benefit of context, and Google searches strip all that out.

So today, instead of pulling another elaborate joke on the TOC blog, we’re going to be explaining the one we pulled last week, and tagging our satirical posts and articles as such. It might seem like babying our readers in a way, but on the Internet, some jokes are only funny the first time you tell them.

Preferred refers

Music,

Looking at keyword referrals for OMIC is pretty entertaining, as I imagine it is for most bloggers.

In addition to lots of people looking for MP3s of New Wave songs from the 80s, I also tend to get a lot of referrals from “chicago pimp cups.” Not just pimp cups, mind you, but Chicago-centric pimp cups which I imagine would have to feature a bejeweled rendering of Mayor Daley. Ironic though that it leads them to this post.

I’ve also been getting a lot of Google traffic lately for people looking for info on Journey’s new lead singer.

But today I was very pleased to discover that I am the #4 Google search result for “don henley blowhard.” It’s really comforting to know that I am not alone in this opinion.

TOC tackles blogs

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This week’s Time Out Chicago is devoted to an important question: as blogging and user reviews become the most widely-read forms of reviewing and criticism, how do you know who to listen to?

The answer is simple: Read more.

I’ll just dispense with two bits right off the bat: anyone who doesn’t take blogging or amateur review sites like Yelp seriously is an idiot and anyone who doesn’t read any critic or reviewer with skepticism is too.

I wrote the lead story in the feature package, in part because I was so mouthy about how it should be written during the early brainstorming sessions that the Features department finally called my bluff and said “OK, you write it then.” It’s already engendering a little hysteria on the Yelp forums – hysteria that quickly dissipates when someone actually reads the piece.

I’ll admit to being in the pro-blogging camp, thanks to my time at Chicagoist; there is simply no better medium than blogging for writing about the immediacy of culture. But even though it’s a medium that’s been around for a decade, people are still coming to terms with it as its effects shape the consensus about not just movies and music, but also restaurants, businesses and current events. I believe online writing ought to be treated the same way as print criticism: one should take the time to understand the person who’s doing the critiquing before they can really understand the writing.

This was a risky subject for us to tackle, since the fact that we’re published on paper will automatically make anything we have to say on the subject of blogging seem suspect. And truth be told, this issue was a difficult birth. But overall, I’m really happy with the job we did. We take a critical, but respectful look at online writing that addresses the pros and the cons.

I count many bloggers as friends and acquaintances. So perhaps there was a bit of myopia at work when I began this issue. I think I felt that the Chicago blogging community was much larger than it actually is. We really had to push ourselves to find people in Chicago that were looking at their chosen subjects with a critical voice (and weren’t blogging as an extension of their profession), while not being too duplicative in the people we chose to profile over eight different stories, most of which profile several different blogs. Some fields (theater, food) have more voices than others. But some that you’d expect would be overrun with criticism – music, for instance – were not.

Let me be clear: there are lots of great music bloggers in Chicago. You can click on any of the folks in the Chicago Music Blogs section at right, and find wit, intelligence, and great writing (and Lord knows that blogroll needs and update cos there are lots of people I’m missing). But the folks who are writing actual criticism – writing that puts the works they discuss in context and measures what the artist is trying to do against what they accomplished – are rare. The field is still wide open for someone to step in and have an influential voice. And this isn’t just me saying this. Most of the folks I talked to, bloggers and professional critics alike, had a tough time naming local online writers they checked out on a daily basis.

But it’s really true of any field of culture right now, despite the fact that Chicago magazine is able to name 171 great websites* in the city. There’s a lot of information out there, to be sure. But the world could really use someone to put it all in context. That ought to be a challenge to anyone reading this. Frankly, it ought to be a challenge for me to do more with this space than just making snide comments about 80s metal, but I could use a break from work sometimes.

I’d encourage you to read all the articles in the package, but in particular check out the online roundtable featuring local print and online critics and the rundown of amateur critics’ blogs we found most worthy of bookmark status.Oh and my piece, of course. But you’ve done that already, right?

* Their story is more about informational websites, rather than critical/reviewing websites. It’s something you’d be able to see for yourself if the damn thing was posted. I know what it’s like having a small Web team, Chicago magazine. But get this story online already!