Citizen Journalist editor meets head-to-head with controversial blogger - By N.L. Belardes
OK, so it's not any kind of Rock-em Sock-em robot match; this is a great themed day of speeches to the Writers of Kern with myself and the Bakersfield Californian Citizen Journalist editor, Ray Hacke.
We're going to be on-hand to talk to writers about local writing opportunities. Here's a rough draft of my speech titled, "Aggressive Blogging For Today's Writers."
Rough draft of speech to Writers of Kern:
In the future, history will look back to the early age of the Internet, and condense time, periodize an era, even break time into pieces never before imagined by the people living it. Where people like you and I once saw a division between the advent of the Internet and the advent of the blog, no longer will the two be separated except in maybe a fragment of a sentence in a history book written 15 years from now.
History itself will periodize such a body of knowledge, of what has happened regarding the Internet, into unique categories. Historian Samuel Eliot Morison periodized European exploration into the Northern Voyages and Southern Voyages because he wanted to split two volumes of history via discovery before Columbus’ Book of Winds, and discovery afterwards. Maybe historians will call a book about such a history of the Internet era, Man’s Voyages into the Data Storm. In such a history there could be two books, one of humans leaving light footprints on the Internet within a vast unexplored sea of corporations, and another book of those who interacted on a deeper level, a level involving the human experience like a great cyclone of cyber energy in cyber-born relationships. These people perhaps became a part of the Internet itself in the symbiosis of inter-relationships waiting to be had by people interdependent of each other because of wireless and Ethernet data streams. On other words, a great “online love fest” as the creator of the Californian’s bakotopia.com once told me.
But I am not here to tell you the advent of chat/blogging/text messaging is tantamount to the Gutenburg Bible and the wildfire-like spreading of the printing press in Europe. And even so, that begs the question, was the printing press even the sole catalyst for intellectual activity in the form of books in the mid-15th Century? That would be technological determinism: life determined by a watch or a car battery. Books were likely on their way no matter what: printing press or no printing press. Books could not be stopped.
Speaking of the history of the Internet, you have to ask whether the Internet will stand by itself as a historical topic in the future, or really be an extension of thought in periodizing a ‘communication revolution’ that incorporates morse code, television, telephones, cell phones, computers, blackberries, Ethernet, serial, wireless, and new ways of writing, reading, talking and messaging…
I want you to think about a certain thought in regards to the print and communications revolutions. Because with them came empowerment to some degree. With print, universities and the many motifs within European Reformation history there suddenly was the ability to speak in new ways to new groups of people. That meant empowerment for individuals and certain groups and communities. Of course even individuals could create and distribute religious tracts, and even a few hundred years later in America there was a pamphlet revolution that helped spread the seeds of revolutionary thought, of declaring the rights of man to be handed out on street corners, in pubs and churches.
Ask yourself how such messages are spread about today, and if you have a message?
Think about this: There are other advancements. Do we need to go into each and every one? No. Yet each advancement spawns literacy. With literacy comes the desire to write. And with the desire to write comes the possibility of vast socio-cultural change. Why? With empowerment comes the chance for opportunity. Literacy creates opportunity.
In the news last Thursday: 1 billion people now have access to the Internet! Whereas the printing press spread quickly, the Internet, and, dare I say the word, blogging, has spread as a different kind of fire, more like a raging virus, out of control, sometimes, without direction, often, but within is a vast sea, a network of knowledge and people filled with complexities that hopefully science and technology itself can begin one day to get its arms around.
Within such a global infection, because that’s how far the Internet reaches within the blink of an eye, globally—you can chat with people on the other side of the planet. That’s writing, that’s literacy, and the more that people do it, the more literacy happens, fast. Blogging, chatting, commenting on the Internet. A child’s typing soon picks up speed because they’re talking to their parents while at work, or to their friends. Is this where the new age of literacy is being expressed? Even within the comments on the pages of myspace.com? Do you even know what myspace is? Don’t think it’s so bad if you want to sell books.
How hard is it to write the first paragraph in a book?
How hard is it to write a letter to your Senator? Maybe a little easier. Still needs structure.
How easy is it to email friends, or chat with loved ones on a jungle island when you’re sitting in your semi-arid Central Valley? Feeling more comfortable?
And blogging, it’s not new anymore. But now, publicly where before your voice was hidden in letters and emails and an occasional letter to an editor, now your voice is available for all the world to see.
Are you using your voice? Are you blogging? You’re a writer aren’t you?
That’s why I’m here today, to talk to you about how we can help each other through this community of blogging. I’m here to share with you, not secrets, but a mutual desire to use our voices. Are you truly using your voice?
I was in debate with a representative of the Bakersfield Californian recently. He called, along with a lot of journalists, this an era for ‘conversation journalism’. These are articles with comments on the Internet that are sometimes printed in newspapers. I disagreed, not that conversations shouldn’t occur in blogs and on news websites, but when a newspaper takes conversations as content that they resell back to customers without paying all conversation participants; that’s where there’s something wrong. Sure, you don’t pay the people you interview. But the conversations, and the citizen journalists writing their own news in this new era of journalism are quite often writing for free! Oh, there’s more to the problem, but it’s actually a good thing.
The news media values your voice.
Society values what you have to say.
Even if you’re not a paid journalist. Just ask the guy who took photos with his camera phone on the London Subway just after the bombing.
That means whether or not you’re paid for your blogs, and whether I stand here and say there should be no free content, and that this is a new age of exploited labor for writers, you still need to write in addition to your works of art.
Write in addition to your works of art. But find a balance. Promote yourself, but be careful in how you do it.
Quickly, what is a blog? A blog is like a journal, or a news site, or a personal information site with words, photos, video, or any combination, updated regularly. But in how the Internet is structured, blogs get attention. If done right, people flock to them. The built in code allows your blog the power to be subscribed to like an automated newspaper instantly sent to your computer doorstep.
Why write in addition to your works of art? Soon, perhaps you will join the world of blogging. You will take sides, or play the sides as best you can to get the best marketing for yourself. Either way, you have a community and a voice. Are you using your voice? Bloggers just may be a new age of global farm workers, farming words like beets and asparagus so the farmer media can resell those yummy foodstuffs to eager eaters of online information. Maybe bloggers need a union. Who knows? There is already a collective voice. Either way, are you a part of the voice collective, or even as an individual?
What are your goals as a writer? To be heard? Then be heard!
Are you blogging or just writing books and stressing over that first paragraph in your great American novel? Isn’t what you’re doing creating with your voice so others can hear you? Who is going to hear you if you just write a book and send it to a publisher? No. You have to market, you need to create a fan base, you need to create and network and build on the Internet. Publishers don’t do all the marketing. You have to market yourself. I did with my ‘Paperback Writer’ blog and so can you. The tools are there and your way to online attention has already been paved.
With the Internet comes self-publishing in an age that history has yet to look at and say, this is the revolution that happened before our eyes: a new literacy, a new self-declared cyber pamphleteering, a new age of marketing, and maybe even a new age of romanticism. Are you on eharmony.com?
And such a history will come, will be told. And when your kids, grandkids and so forth read such history, will you have been a part of it?
As a writer yourself what is your most important attribute?
I will say again, it is the voice you use through the tool of writing you choose.
Tools change over time: pencil becomes pen; pen becomes typewriter; typewriter becomes computer and the computer as a tool has already transformed before your eyes as if the very difference between Pong on your Atari 2600 and Doom 3 on your four hard drive 300 gig Pentium blah blah processor. That would be DOS to Windows, and the window to the future being new tools and the human race achieving new dreams in how to communicate.
But you’re just a writer you say…
No, you are a human being with a voice, and you have chosen, or it’s been chosen for you that your voice is your gift.
Let’s face it. Newspapers are dying. Classifieds are waning and advertising has gone the way of the Internet, surpassing print. That means you need to be on the Internet. You are empowered. But the Internet isn’t enough. You need a blog. The new local niche markets created by the local Bakersfield Californian in the realm of conversation journalism even welcomes you.
Take Bakotopia.com for example. It’s a great idea, although a variant over my own website that features grassroots news, music, literature, and theatre. You never know what I’m going to review or write about; including this meeting. You can interact on either my site or on bakotopia. It is a niche on the Web created because newspaper classifieds are dying. Yet Bakotopia is community oriented. Where my site now gets between 1500 and 2000 unique hits a day, Bakotopia claims to get twice that. And they should. They are run by a newspaper. I’m just one person. And so are you. Like my site bakotopia is growing. I write blogs, they use the content, traffic gets directed back to my site for the full article, more pics, etc. But why network with them?
Bakotopia was written up in the Wall Street Journal. Editor & Publisher magazine. They won an edgy award. Type any combination into Google and you will find the hidden truth behind Bakotopia’s bakomatic software. It’s an incredible tale of a newspaper developing a software to be sold to other news organizations, and especially to build connections within their own community and a journalistic community at large. Behind the scenes the creators are giving symposiums around the country. Promotion is hot and heavy. They’re the only newspaper in the country with free online classifieds through bakotopia. Do a search, you can dig right to the heart of bakotopia and read:
Dan Pacheco, Senior Product Manager, The Bakersfield Californian, Bakotopia , One newspaper company’s bold attempt to build mindshare among local youth (and assorted other thoughts).
Yet it doesn’t stop there. You can find many online communities, only bakotopia.com offers a community that right now is being looked at along with my site. But only because we market our sites. It’s what you should do.
If you want to meet bloggers/writers… you can start by reading this entire speech online on my site and commenting on it. Use your voice. Start somewhere. Positive or negative thoughts. It doesn’t matter. Just start blogging. I will also post photos and part of this article on bakotopia.com. You too can ‘be the media’.
Sacrifice some time each day to promote yourself. No one is going to do that much for you, but you.
Start here, leave a comment, build a blog, find out what you believe in and start writing. It doesn’t have to match the theme of the novel you’re working on. Build.
Remember, publishers will only do so much marketing for you. You have to get the word out. There’s a Yosemite Writers Conference coming up where writers can learn more about doing their own marketing. Why? Because the publisher's marketing budgets are so small these days. You can also follow up on blogging because the Yosemite conference is doing a whole panel on blogging and another on Web marketing for authors. Plus, many authors today are having to hire their own independent publicists. One of the biggest in the field, Maggie Griffin, is coming to the conference.
Plus, they’re really known for being a writer-friendly conference that is agent heavy so as to continue a history of fostering strong manuscript sales while supporting CA writers through a Valley writing contest. I urge you to go to the Yosemite Writers Conference. Invest in yourself. You are what you want to market, right? Then do it.
In part of what I’m doing to build a community I also started Noveltown. It’s a venture to network with writers like yourself, to cross promote, to publish books and e-books, and to help build a literary community. In part I model slightly after Heyday Books and Greywolf Press. Heyday Books has a Valley Writers series. Go to their site and buy at least one book. Show valley writers that you are ready to support. Think of it like tithing. You will get something great in return if you show you are part of the cause.
I started networking with musicians and artists, but today marks only the second time I am truly beginning to build the dream with the Writers of Kern. Take a look at noveltown from time to time. We’re going to start a journal, a video news page, a short film contest, and much more. My dream is to build literary arts within the Central Valley. I share this vision with only a few. But it will take many pro-active writers to realize the dream. People need to share ideas, share networking, cross-promote with writers, theatre, music, journalists, artists, and business leaders all over the valley. In the meantime you can start by helping yourself.
Speak out. It’s your gift to the Valley and to the world...
We're going to be on-hand to talk to writers about local writing opportunities. Here's a rough draft of my speech titled, "Aggressive Blogging For Today's Writers."
Rough draft of speech to Writers of Kern:
In the future, history will look back to the early age of the Internet, and condense time, periodize an era, even break time into pieces never before imagined by the people living it. Where people like you and I once saw a division between the advent of the Internet and the advent of the blog, no longer will the two be separated except in maybe a fragment of a sentence in a history book written 15 years from now.
History itself will periodize such a body of knowledge, of what has happened regarding the Internet, into unique categories. Historian Samuel Eliot Morison periodized European exploration into the Northern Voyages and Southern Voyages because he wanted to split two volumes of history via discovery before Columbus’ Book of Winds, and discovery afterwards. Maybe historians will call a book about such a history of the Internet era, Man’s Voyages into the Data Storm. In such a history there could be two books, one of humans leaving light footprints on the Internet within a vast unexplored sea of corporations, and another book of those who interacted on a deeper level, a level involving the human experience like a great cyclone of cyber energy in cyber-born relationships. These people perhaps became a part of the Internet itself in the symbiosis of inter-relationships waiting to be had by people interdependent of each other because of wireless and Ethernet data streams. On other words, a great “online love fest” as the creator of the Californian’s bakotopia.com once told me.
But I am not here to tell you the advent of chat/blogging/text messaging is tantamount to the Gutenburg Bible and the wildfire-like spreading of the printing press in Europe. And even so, that begs the question, was the printing press even the sole catalyst for intellectual activity in the form of books in the mid-15th Century? That would be technological determinism: life determined by a watch or a car battery. Books were likely on their way no matter what: printing press or no printing press. Books could not be stopped.
Speaking of the history of the Internet, you have to ask whether the Internet will stand by itself as a historical topic in the future, or really be an extension of thought in periodizing a ‘communication revolution’ that incorporates morse code, television, telephones, cell phones, computers, blackberries, Ethernet, serial, wireless, and new ways of writing, reading, talking and messaging…
I want you to think about a certain thought in regards to the print and communications revolutions. Because with them came empowerment to some degree. With print, universities and the many motifs within European Reformation history there suddenly was the ability to speak in new ways to new groups of people. That meant empowerment for individuals and certain groups and communities. Of course even individuals could create and distribute religious tracts, and even a few hundred years later in America there was a pamphlet revolution that helped spread the seeds of revolutionary thought, of declaring the rights of man to be handed out on street corners, in pubs and churches.
Ask yourself how such messages are spread about today, and if you have a message?
Think about this: There are other advancements. Do we need to go into each and every one? No. Yet each advancement spawns literacy. With literacy comes the desire to write. And with the desire to write comes the possibility of vast socio-cultural change. Why? With empowerment comes the chance for opportunity. Literacy creates opportunity.
In the news last Thursday: 1 billion people now have access to the Internet! Whereas the printing press spread quickly, the Internet, and, dare I say the word, blogging, has spread as a different kind of fire, more like a raging virus, out of control, sometimes, without direction, often, but within is a vast sea, a network of knowledge and people filled with complexities that hopefully science and technology itself can begin one day to get its arms around.
Within such a global infection, because that’s how far the Internet reaches within the blink of an eye, globally—you can chat with people on the other side of the planet. That’s writing, that’s literacy, and the more that people do it, the more literacy happens, fast. Blogging, chatting, commenting on the Internet. A child’s typing soon picks up speed because they’re talking to their parents while at work, or to their friends. Is this where the new age of literacy is being expressed? Even within the comments on the pages of myspace.com? Do you even know what myspace is? Don’t think it’s so bad if you want to sell books.
How hard is it to write the first paragraph in a book?
How hard is it to write a letter to your Senator? Maybe a little easier. Still needs structure.
How easy is it to email friends, or chat with loved ones on a jungle island when you’re sitting in your semi-arid Central Valley? Feeling more comfortable?
And blogging, it’s not new anymore. But now, publicly where before your voice was hidden in letters and emails and an occasional letter to an editor, now your voice is available for all the world to see.
Are you using your voice? Are you blogging? You’re a writer aren’t you?
That’s why I’m here today, to talk to you about how we can help each other through this community of blogging. I’m here to share with you, not secrets, but a mutual desire to use our voices. Are you truly using your voice?
I was in debate with a representative of the Bakersfield Californian recently. He called, along with a lot of journalists, this an era for ‘conversation journalism’. These are articles with comments on the Internet that are sometimes printed in newspapers. I disagreed, not that conversations shouldn’t occur in blogs and on news websites, but when a newspaper takes conversations as content that they resell back to customers without paying all conversation participants; that’s where there’s something wrong. Sure, you don’t pay the people you interview. But the conversations, and the citizen journalists writing their own news in this new era of journalism are quite often writing for free! Oh, there’s more to the problem, but it’s actually a good thing.
The news media values your voice.
Society values what you have to say.
Even if you’re not a paid journalist. Just ask the guy who took photos with his camera phone on the London Subway just after the bombing.
That means whether or not you’re paid for your blogs, and whether I stand here and say there should be no free content, and that this is a new age of exploited labor for writers, you still need to write in addition to your works of art.
Write in addition to your works of art. But find a balance. Promote yourself, but be careful in how you do it.
Quickly, what is a blog? A blog is like a journal, or a news site, or a personal information site with words, photos, video, or any combination, updated regularly. But in how the Internet is structured, blogs get attention. If done right, people flock to them. The built in code allows your blog the power to be subscribed to like an automated newspaper instantly sent to your computer doorstep.
Why write in addition to your works of art? Soon, perhaps you will join the world of blogging. You will take sides, or play the sides as best you can to get the best marketing for yourself. Either way, you have a community and a voice. Are you using your voice? Bloggers just may be a new age of global farm workers, farming words like beets and asparagus so the farmer media can resell those yummy foodstuffs to eager eaters of online information. Maybe bloggers need a union. Who knows? There is already a collective voice. Either way, are you a part of the voice collective, or even as an individual?
What are your goals as a writer? To be heard? Then be heard!
Are you blogging or just writing books and stressing over that first paragraph in your great American novel? Isn’t what you’re doing creating with your voice so others can hear you? Who is going to hear you if you just write a book and send it to a publisher? No. You have to market, you need to create a fan base, you need to create and network and build on the Internet. Publishers don’t do all the marketing. You have to market yourself. I did with my ‘Paperback Writer’ blog and so can you. The tools are there and your way to online attention has already been paved.
With the Internet comes self-publishing in an age that history has yet to look at and say, this is the revolution that happened before our eyes: a new literacy, a new self-declared cyber pamphleteering, a new age of marketing, and maybe even a new age of romanticism. Are you on eharmony.com?
And such a history will come, will be told. And when your kids, grandkids and so forth read such history, will you have been a part of it?
As a writer yourself what is your most important attribute?
I will say again, it is the voice you use through the tool of writing you choose.
Tools change over time: pencil becomes pen; pen becomes typewriter; typewriter becomes computer and the computer as a tool has already transformed before your eyes as if the very difference between Pong on your Atari 2600 and Doom 3 on your four hard drive 300 gig Pentium blah blah processor. That would be DOS to Windows, and the window to the future being new tools and the human race achieving new dreams in how to communicate.
But you’re just a writer you say…
No, you are a human being with a voice, and you have chosen, or it’s been chosen for you that your voice is your gift.
Let’s face it. Newspapers are dying. Classifieds are waning and advertising has gone the way of the Internet, surpassing print. That means you need to be on the Internet. You are empowered. But the Internet isn’t enough. You need a blog. The new local niche markets created by the local Bakersfield Californian in the realm of conversation journalism even welcomes you.
Take Bakotopia.com for example. It’s a great idea, although a variant over my own website that features grassroots news, music, literature, and theatre. You never know what I’m going to review or write about; including this meeting. You can interact on either my site or on bakotopia. It is a niche on the Web created because newspaper classifieds are dying. Yet Bakotopia is community oriented. Where my site now gets between 1500 and 2000 unique hits a day, Bakotopia claims to get twice that. And they should. They are run by a newspaper. I’m just one person. And so are you. Like my site bakotopia is growing. I write blogs, they use the content, traffic gets directed back to my site for the full article, more pics, etc. But why network with them?
Bakotopia was written up in the Wall Street Journal. Editor & Publisher magazine. They won an edgy award. Type any combination into Google and you will find the hidden truth behind Bakotopia’s bakomatic software. It’s an incredible tale of a newspaper developing a software to be sold to other news organizations, and especially to build connections within their own community and a journalistic community at large. Behind the scenes the creators are giving symposiums around the country. Promotion is hot and heavy. They’re the only newspaper in the country with free online classifieds through bakotopia. Do a search, you can dig right to the heart of bakotopia and read:
Dan Pacheco, Senior Product Manager, The Bakersfield Californian, Bakotopia , One newspaper company’s bold attempt to build mindshare among local youth (and assorted other thoughts).
Yet it doesn’t stop there. You can find many online communities, only bakotopia.com offers a community that right now is being looked at along with my site. But only because we market our sites. It’s what you should do.
If you want to meet bloggers/writers… you can start by reading this entire speech online on my site and commenting on it. Use your voice. Start somewhere. Positive or negative thoughts. It doesn’t matter. Just start blogging. I will also post photos and part of this article on bakotopia.com. You too can ‘be the media’.
Sacrifice some time each day to promote yourself. No one is going to do that much for you, but you.
Start here, leave a comment, build a blog, find out what you believe in and start writing. It doesn’t have to match the theme of the novel you’re working on. Build.
Remember, publishers will only do so much marketing for you. You have to get the word out. There’s a Yosemite Writers Conference coming up where writers can learn more about doing their own marketing. Why? Because the publisher's marketing budgets are so small these days. You can also follow up on blogging because the Yosemite conference is doing a whole panel on blogging and another on Web marketing for authors. Plus, many authors today are having to hire their own independent publicists. One of the biggest in the field, Maggie Griffin, is coming to the conference.
Plus, they’re really known for being a writer-friendly conference that is agent heavy so as to continue a history of fostering strong manuscript sales while supporting CA writers through a Valley writing contest. I urge you to go to the Yosemite Writers Conference. Invest in yourself. You are what you want to market, right? Then do it.
In part of what I’m doing to build a community I also started Noveltown. It’s a venture to network with writers like yourself, to cross promote, to publish books and e-books, and to help build a literary community. In part I model slightly after Heyday Books and Greywolf Press. Heyday Books has a Valley Writers series. Go to their site and buy at least one book. Show valley writers that you are ready to support. Think of it like tithing. You will get something great in return if you show you are part of the cause.
I started networking with musicians and artists, but today marks only the second time I am truly beginning to build the dream with the Writers of Kern. Take a look at noveltown from time to time. We’re going to start a journal, a video news page, a short film contest, and much more. My dream is to build literary arts within the Central Valley. I share this vision with only a few. But it will take many pro-active writers to realize the dream. People need to share ideas, share networking, cross-promote with writers, theatre, music, journalists, artists, and business leaders all over the valley. In the meantime you can start by helping yourself.
Speak out. It’s your gift to the Valley and to the world...
This entry was posted by N.L. Belardes, on
Saturday, May 20, 2006.
You can leave your response.
I use my "voice" on two blogs of my own plus roughly 6 forums I belong to. I spend alot of time researching my posts.I am an armchair activist and proud of it.The MSM doesn't like bloggers and the feeling is mutual for the most part.There are exceptions of course.
I am also an active in the public arena.Its a well rounded use of my "voice".
Great speech NL :)
Dear NL,
I love this speech, thanks for putting it out there.
John
Wow! I hope they took lessons from you. I didn't know that there were a lot of writers in our community. Do they all have books out like you?
I'm glad you say it like it is and that you sound pretty fair to Bakersfield.com's "Citizen Journalism" where anyone can write and not get paid.
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