Friday, April 18, 2008

Tips on surviving as a journalist in web 2.0

Over at Media Shift Lisa Williams writes of the 10 things that journalists should know about surviving in what has become a high tech industry.

  1. It is boom and bust-ie you get laid off when the economy is good, and you get laid off when the economy is bad.
  2. Everyone gets recycled. Act accordingly
  3. Bring your values to online companies; bring your skills back to news companies.
  4. Forget about company loyalty
  5. Time is on your side, but only if you take it.
  6. Progress is about alternating breaking and fixing. Anything 100% working is 100% dead.
  7. No manual? Write the fine manual
  8. The web rewards narrow comprehensiveness - "everything about something."
  9. On the web, the most successful companies don't build, they collapse. They take something that used to cost money and make it free. What costs money in your region that you can make free?
  10. Yes, read the manual. The whole thing. Really.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the edit! Plus, we're now both part of the venerable "shorter" tradition of things like "Shorter Paul Krugman" where people try to summarize an entire column in as few words as possible.

One of the ideas that underlies these ten things is that journalists may end up working for high-tech companies directly.

Just curious: would you, personally, ever work for Google or Yahoo? What kind of companies are on your "career radar screen"?

Anonymous said...

Sorry, above comment is from me, Lisa Williams of Placeblogger!

Nigel Barlow said...

Thanks Lisa,

To be honest I'm not sure where my career options stand at the moment.
I can't see myself working for the likes of Yahoo and Google though.
I am tying to cultivate a feature writing style concentrating on political,environmental or travel writing