Blogging is easy to keep up with, said no one. Ever.
As I mentioned earlier in this semester, I have been a very lethargic blogger throughout the past few years, losing momentum after several weeks of starting a blog. This blog has been different, however, mainly because I needed to dedicate myself to it for my Online Journalism and Digital Media course.
Even though it was required of me to keep up with this blog for the course, I have learned some valuable lessons from it. First, I have learned to fight through my bouts of writer's block and procrastination through the enforced deadline in the syllabus. By keeping my own schedule of deadlines in the future for blog posts, I will be able to be more consistent with maintaining my blogs over a longer period of time.
Aside from the aforementioned issues, I would also say that I had difficulties in promoting myself and creating an About Me section. Talking about yourself in the third person sounds a little arrogant if not done correctly, but if you talk too little about yourself or downplay your accomplishments then you can sound self-deprecating. Neither situation is ideal.
Throughout this course, we have learned to use some pretty interesting online and digital media tools, which are discussed in my most recent blog post about the "tools of the trade."
The most useful of these is probably the Storify website that is used to curate articles by using public tweets, Facebook posts, YouTube videos, Flickr and more. I feel that news curation - especially in cases where the public might be heavily involved in commenting about it -is a great way to get an overview of whatever the event or situation might be.
The least useful tool that we used during this course would have to be the XtraNormal video site. Even though creating a video for my blog was a fun project, I find it difficult to believe that this site would have any true journalistic application.
Overall, I feel that social media and blogging are great ways to publish
and promote your writing when you're a student or if you are just launching a career in journalism.
Many people, especially younger generations, receive a great deal of their news through social media, meaning that it will be vital in continuing the field of journalism. About 50 percent of people receive their breaking news updates through social media, which I can relate to as I originally found out about Osama bin Laden being captured and the Boston Marathon bombing through Facebook.
I will continue to use this blog to write about both the lessons I learned as a college editor-in-chief and to use it as a way to publish news, features and opinion content to keep myself writing and meeting self-determined deadlines.
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| Self-portrait in Cusco, Peru. Photo Credit: Lauren J. Mapp |
Tweets by @LaurenJMapp
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