Tweet!
I tweeted a joke the other day:
Sudden overwhelming desire to eat a bag of Cheetos; does this mean I’m going to blog 10 posts a day like it was 2003?
— Seth Anderson (@swanksalot)
and while I never did fulfill my desire to scarf down a bag of Cheetos and/or a bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos, I did decide that maybe I should challenge myself to write ten blog posts. In the dark ages, before Twitter and Facebook, before the corporate media began to emulate the blog model, et al, I did post a hell of a lot more content here. Ten posts was not a particular daily metric I tried to achieve, I was happy with five posts, but ten happened every once and a while. Now, to be honest, I’m not a long-winded person, so it isn’t like I typically write five hundred or a thousand words of my own per post, I’m more of a blogger of the Kottke school, pointing you to read something interesting somewhere else, while liberally quoting from the original source.
I did other things yesterday too, but I didn’t post my tenth post until 7:30 PM. If blogging was a job, each day of work would typically be a long day.
Pippen Peruses the Newspaper
According to Erica Berger, insisting upon ten posts a day means more click-bait articles, more shallow articles, less actual journalism will be practiced.
Every journalism student knows they are supposed to shine a spotlight on the issues that matter. It’s a sad truth that some of our greatest reporters have had to bail out in search of a saner or more impactful job. But it’s hard to do that when your boss wants you to churn out 10 posts a day. And when journalists are expected to maintain an active social-media presence and share their thoughts on every fresh twist in the 24-hour news cycle, it’s difficult to find the time to identify the stories that truly need telling.
(click here to continue reading The next generation of journalism students have no idea what they’re getting into – Quartz.)
Luckily, I don’t have that kind of pressure, other than self-imposed, so don’t expect to see any listicles posted here.