Tag: Blogging

Blogging elsewhere in 2008: a highlight reel

I did a lot of blogging here and elsewhere in 2008. Care for a review?

Publications:

  • Super Tuesday Blog — writing about a younger perspective on the 2008 presidential primaries for WHYY, the Philadelphia NPR affiliate
  • Broad & Cecil — a news blog I helped launch for The Temple News, my college newspaper
  • Philadelphia Partisan Politics — a blog I created to chronicle writing my undergraduate honors thesis
  • Capitol Ideas — adding state government reporting to the Harrisburg blog of the Allentown Morning Call
  • WDSTL — a travel blog and video podcast I maintained with a friend while backpacking Europe

Below see some specific posts from those publications.

Continue reading Blogging elsewhere in 2008: a highlight reel

Give an excerpt of your stories in a feed, get more clicks

inquirer-google-reader

You gotta give something to get something, man.

So, I’m tired of newspapers ignoring the details of an RSS feed. In a mobile world, I have to believe that choosing what Internet news, information, and blog updates come to you will be the future.

So why aren’t newspapers figuring out the details?

Continue reading Give an excerpt of your stories in a feed, get more clicks

When to forward post to meet your Web traffic: the busiest times on the Internet

Choosing carefully when to post to your Web site, whether you are a newspaper or a blogger, is supposed to be a boon to your traffic.

Insightful Web analytics, they tell me, are the golden ticket to blossoming attention. So what time should you be posting?

Continue reading When to forward post to meet your Web traffic: the busiest times on the Internet

Newest BNET Energy-industry blogger, me

Talk to me in a few weeks. I ought to be some sort of expert on the global energy industry.

Largely on the back of my internship with the Philadelphia Business Journal and my blogging experience in a variety of venues, I am proud to say that I’ve gotten a gig blogging on the energy industry for BNET Industries, an industry-news provider and subsidiary of CBS Interactive.

That means I have a steady alternative revenue stream – for the time being. It isn’t full-time, so no health insurance, but for a freelance journalist, it’s a golden gig to get some steady money (more tips like that in a future post).

Continue reading Newest BNET Energy-industry blogger, me

Marketing yourself online: your byline is your brand

Last week I announced my intentions to give one of the hardest professional roads a try. I’m trying to be a freelance journalist – in Philadelphia, a city in a persistent media hiring freeze.

So if it’s always important to brand yourself, now is a particularly important juncture for this underemployed writer. For more than a year now though, leading up to and continuing beyond my college graduation, I have employed and developed a growing online community of methods to take control over my Web presence.

I am obsessively trying to find ways to market myself online like more and more multimedia journalists of all ages and experiences. So, what are you doing to promote your name?

Continue reading Marketing yourself online: your byline is your brand

Look at the comments, stupid

Man, who doesn’t have a blog.

Any newspaper that can even be tossed in the conversation has someone adding to it. There is no end to the number of jerks like me doing much of the same, with less experience and knowledge but increasingly more interest than the more professional.

The question, of course, is if any of it is working. One of the simpler answers, I’d say, is, well, look at the comments. If they’re improving, you’re improving.

Continue reading Look at the comments, stupid

Professional versus personal: My Web presence explained

Last month I introduced a personal blog, where I intend on updating about meaningful experiences in my life, as part of pursuit of a Life To Do List.

In truth, I tend to lose interest when someone has a legion of online presences, blogs begetting other blogs.

That’s not what this is meant to be. Instead, I believe a professional outlet is of paramount importance — develop and share perspective on your industry, become a thought leader and all that good stuff. To do that, you ought not muddle it all up with too many personal stories. …I think.

To be honest, I’m still figuring it out. While our brands need personal attention too, of course, I think there’s a line. I suppose that’s what I’m trying to figure it out.

If you’re going to have a professional and personal split online, that’s one I can understand, though I am still developing an opinion on whether I agree with myself.

Failed post for BNet

I have been pretty active developing my blogging skills. No, seriously, there are blogging skills.

So, when I saw that BNet, an online business news site launched in 2007 by CNet Networks, was looking for bloggers, I wanted to give it a go. I’ve been in talks with some folks there, who wanted me to start with some trial posts. Trouble is, I’m in Europe.

I did get one done before I left. However, it seems I missed their focus a bit. I got an e-mail from one of BNet’s editors yesterday, thanking me for posting but telling me the following:

We tend to avoid pieces about stock and commodities prices. Were more interested in the goings on inside Energy companies.

Backpacking in Europe these days keeps me a little busy, so I’ll try to figure this out when I return.

After the jump check what I submitted.

Continue reading Failed post for BNet

Archived Blog – Tokyo Never Happened

By Christopher Wink | Dec. 19, 2006 | Final JYA blog post

UPDATE Feb. 12, 2011: All my NBCU JYA writing, video and photo work has been transferred to subdomain japan.christopherwink.com.

Things are easier on this side. I realized that when I woke up and, in my persistently active manner, decided I had to go the bank and settle some business. I spent at least a full minute worrying about how I would say what I needed to say in Japanese. Once I realized that wasn’t much necessary, it occurred to me that I have begun a nice grace period where everything I do is going to be awfully simple in comparison to my maneuvering and studying and eating and buying and banking in Tokyo.

The question I am almost always asked is if it is “strange” to be back in the United States. Of course, mostly it isn’t. I am a man of limited means so, while I most certainly have done a lot for what I have been offered, I have spent a great deal of my life wherever my family considered home. It is not strange to return to what I have known for two decades. I may have to readjust and rediscover, but strange is unknown and different. To be sure, in a grand sense, there is nothing different about the America I have found.

Continue reading Archived Blog – Tokyo Never Happened

Archived Blog – For Starters

Christopher Wink | Aug. 28, 2006 | First JYA blog post

UPDATE Feb. 12, 2011: All my NBCU JYA writing, video and photo work has been transferred to subdomain japan.christopherwink.com.

Everyone who is in Japan raise your hand.

Note: I am typing with one hand. Clever, I know.

I am writing to you in my small – but expensive – two hundred thirty square foot apartment which I share with another here in the quiet residential Meguro-ku ward of Tokyo (one of 23 such municipalities). It has been quite a little adventure already, but let’s get ourselves orientated, no?

In the realm of self-evaluation, I love to consider myself the elder statesman of travel – at least for an independently traveling twenty-year-old. While most of my extended absences from my northwest New Jersey home have been wanderings throughout the continental United States, I spent the summer of 2005 in Ghana, West Africa. That was my first attempt at using education as a façade for international travel. Here in Tokyo I am keeping up that very pretext, though the time before I fall asleep is spent dreaming of travel and language, not books and tests.

Continue reading Archived Blog – For Starters