THIS IS ARCHIVED CONTENT

Visit our new site at BusinessJournalism.org

Reynolds Center Programs Daylong Workshops Online Seminars One-hour Tutorials Barlett & Steele Awards Professors Seminar Strictly Financials Seminar Research Covering Business
Business Beats
Starting Out Business Writing Business Design Business Glossary Ethics Five Questions with... Immigration Series Business Journalism Resources Job Listings Academic Programs Book Listings and Reviews Scholarships Calculators Web Resources Tutorials Article Index Workshop Registration

The Reynolds Center has announced its 2009-10 free workshop schedule.

Select a workshop and register from the drop-down menu below.

Online Seminars

The Reynolds Center registration for Fall 2009 free online seminars.

Subscribe

Hooked on Kindle
By Chris Roush

Tracking the Business Behind the Tomato
By Jonathan Higuera

Five Questions with Bill Choyke
By Jonathan Higuera

Finding the Economy's Silver Lining
By Dick Weiss

Double Whammy: Oil and Housing
By Jennifer Hopfinger

Footnoted.org Turns Four, Making it a Blogosphere Dinosaur

E-mail to a friend Print this article

By Michelle Leder
September 20, 2007

Starting a blog is the easiest thing in the world and only takes a few minutes. It's keeping a blog going that is the challenge. By some estimates 40,000 new blogs are launched every day. And while that number seems a bit high to me, there's no denying that blogs are still incredibly popular, especially now that mainstream media -- primarily newspapers -- have jumped in to the fray. A quick skim of the 56 blogs being offered by the Journal-News, my local paper that serves New York City's northern suburbs, gives me a menu of blog choices that seems reminiscent of my local salad bar: from celebrity sightings at a local deli to a blog that provides tips for the time-pressed suburbanite (not included: trying to read 56 different blogs on your newspaper's website).

I've been thinking about blogs a lot lately because footnoted.org, the blog I started to look into the things public companies bury in their routine SEC filings, turned four last month. That may not seem like a long time, but in the blogosphere it is, especially for a non-technology related blog. When I started the site in August 2003, there were only a few business-related blogs, most of which have since "gone dark." But footnoted.org is still plugging away and about to unveil a major redesign. Now, unlike a lot of other blogs out there, I only do one post a day because combing through SEC filings tends to be very time consuming. And, I take a break on weekends. But that still works out to just over 1,000 posts over the past four years.

Not that I'm complaining. Much. Starting a blog has given me a chance to learn new skills at a time when journalism is changing dramatically. And as a freelancer who works from home, it has enabled me to be part of a larger community of smart like-minded people, many of whom have given me lots of excellent (and free) advice over the years. But maintaining a blog -- and not just on the technical side, though that's a constant challenge, too -- takes a lot of work. Newspaper executives who think that simply throwing up a blog will be the answer to their advertising woes still don't understand exactly how much -- and how quickly -- the media landscape is changing.

Email this article

Please enter your friend's e-mail address

Please enter your e-mail address

If you would like to include a message, please add it here:

Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)

Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism