Personal Websites For Journalists

Personal Websites For Journalists

Traditionally, journalists have more or less worked alone. Journalists in both the news business and feature writers for magazines typically will develop their stories, dig up their leads, conduct their interviews and draft the final product themselves. In the newspaper business, major stories will sometimes become collaborative efforts where several reporters are working on aspects of a story and their work is edited into a single piece, published under multiple bylines.

Communicating with a journalist was generally a haphazard affair, placing a call to a switchboard or desk and leaving a message. Today, major newspapers all have websites and provide email addresses for most of their journalists and nearly all of their columnists. People who write columns and opinion pieces are generally more open to communicating with the public because their work is often designed to generate controversy and feedback is important. Occasionally columnists will find ideas for new topics in the email traffic they receive, or will write about the heavy response they received on a particular piece.

A journalist with some initiative can take this communications process one step further by setting up a personal website. That site can serve several purposes: all of them require some work. The function of the site depends, to some degree, on the amount of time the journalist is willing to devote to it. A working reporter may also have to negotiate permission to engage in some online publishing of his own with the editorial staff of the paper or magazine that employs him.

Internet blogs have made some opinionated people in this country powerful and well known, just by virtue of their daily journaling. A working journalist could set up a blog for which he could provide occasional entries, relating to his work or to other news stories or totally unrelated subjects. The value of a blog is that it provides the opportunity for open dialogue among all who wish to log on and participate. Name recognition can be meaningful to some journalists and blogging is one way to develop "viral" recognition by inviting communication. Many people will be attracted to the opportunity to communicate with someone who gets paid to publish.

Blogs can develop story lines for topics for journalists, particularly columnists and feature writers. They can help a professional writer build a persona that doesn't enter into the straight journalism he produces on the job. A personal blog is a way to build a public and well rounded profile that the constraints of a traditional journalism job don't usually allow.

A personal website can also provide the journalist an opportunity to showcase a "profile" of work that is unrelated to the job, or at least has gone unpublished by the employer. Here again, there is a fine line between what the journalist can do online - which is essentially public exposure - and what the requirements of exclusivity on the job may be. But if a journalist has ventured into fiction, a personal website is a great way to put it out there for exposure.

If the goal is a publishing opportunity for fictional work, the website may be a way to short circuit the formal submission rules for fictional work that magazines and book publishers maintain. An established journalist is already a professional writer. Asking a book publishing editor or potential agent to look at product posted on a website is much easier than engaging in the formal process.

BONUS : Plagiarism: A Case Of Copy & Paste

"Fine words! I wonder where you stole 'em." - Jonathan Swift

Whether you write for the web or a magazine it can be tempting to lift a sentence or complete thought and move it into the body of your work. After all, it seems to ft the premise you are working on and you’re facing a deadline.

This is a form of stealing that is addressed often in schools across the nation when students are too tired or lazy to finish an essay using their own words.

“Taking something from one man and making it worse is plagiarism.” - George A. Moore

In order to become knowledgeable about a subject you must conduct research. In doing so you gain insight from those who have also conducted research. In many ways your research is a compilation of other research. It is possible for you to write a more comprehensive article with less first-hand knowledge than some of the ‘expert’ authors you were able to research.

However, if you sidestep proper research you could wind up with an end result that is filled with plagiarism and may well miss the point of your original research.

"Where do architects and designers get their ideas?" The answer, of course, is mainly from other architects and designers, so is it mere casuistry to distinguish between tradition and plagiarism? - Stephen Bayley

We learn the writing styles of others and adapt our own to emulate others depending on our own interests. Many great writers are perceived as such because they are also voracious readers. In turn the styles of the writers, whose words they consumed, became a piece of the reader’s writing style.

In the classic sense of the word, we all plagiarize. We all borrow ideas, thoughts, styles and voice from others who have mined the art of writing.

Writers are blessed in the 21st Century to have the Internet to conduct a broad range of research requirements. The trouble writers face today is using the ‘copy and past’ function on their word processing software and taking chunks of research from someone else and then passing it off as if they were the original authors.

“Originality, I fear, is too often only undetected and frequently unconscious plagiarism” - W. R. Inge

Our writing skills are often an amalgam of all we have absorbed in our writing, but we must do our best to present our articles in a manner that includes our own thoughts and when the words of others are used they should be cited. Your credibility as a writer is at stake.