Fifteen weeks young | From the Publisher’s Laptop
From the Publisher's Laptop, Opinion — By Christopher Spencer on October 1, 2009 at 11:32 pm
Ozarks Unbound has always been an experiment for me.
It’s a way to stay in the area, do what I love through writing, hopefully contribute an editorial voice in the community and someday make a living. Helping others get their voice out there is critical as well to my experiment.
My assumption is that increased communication and dialogue is always a net positive. To this goal, if anyone wants to start communicating online, I’m happy to help you set up a blog. No cost. You can host it here at Ozarks Unbound, or we can set it up elsewhere. We just need to work around my schedule.
I went to Birmingham this past weekend to attend a WordCamp. WordCamps are conferences done grassroots-style and on the cheap ($30) for enthusiasts of WordPress, the open source (aka free) blogging program that runs Ozarks Unbound as well as Fayettevittles (my partially abandoned attempt at a food blog).
Also, the local papers use it when they pop out special event blogs for elections or even Bikes Blues and BBQ.
Attending that conference was a real energizer for me. It confirmed for me that working online as an independent news publisher is an exciting and valid prospect. I won’t bore you with all the details of the conference, but feel free to check out the special event blog I’m using to do recaps of my experience.
News-wise, in the last few weeks, Ozarks Unbound covered the Fayetteville school millage defeat. I wrote an opinion piece about Wal-Mart’s efforts to buy their way into environmentalism’s good graces and a new Portrait of An Artist, featuring the poet Johnathon Williams was published.
Also, please check out our new advice column, The ‘In’ Box by Lucy Brown. OU writer Jeff Sistrunk contributed a great write up of the band Apartment 5. He also provided a review of Tuesday’s performance by 12 Stone at George’s. Check it out.
I can’t say enough thanks to the faithful Songbook contributors. Dug Begley provided a litany of protest songs. Anna Colston laid bare her eclectic and awesome taste in music. Very enjoyable. Fayetteville artist Megan Chapman provides this week’s selections for Songbook.
I hope you’re also enjoying this experiment online.
It’s cliche, but experimentation and failure are key, especially in such a transitional time for media. Every now and then I get a little bogged down – my mind racing with new ideas for the site I’m unable to do technically, or the writer’s block comes down hard.
I watch this video when that happens. It reminds me how quickly things are changing. It’s a challenging video with lots of mind-blowing information, but almost always re-energizes me to keep trying new things, new experiments.
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4 Comments
Seems to me the experiment is adding value to the community. Hope it stay around for a while.
I saw a version of this video two years ago at a schools conference. It reminds me of the book “The Earth is Flat.” It should be required reading for anyone that is thinking/planning ahead beyond the Friday happy hour stress dump.
Again, keep up the good work.
migoi
Really nice of you to say, Migoi. I’m always open to suggestions on how to make things better here.
I’m sincere about helping folks get a blog out there. It’s incredibly easy and I think benefits us all to have more people online.
I’ll check out that book. It’s on my list now. I’d not heard of it before.
I think you wil find The Earth is Flat interesting, because it’s about you… not you personally, but you, as in you an ordinary guy that can have a viable chance at impacting the infoscape due to current technologies.
You sentence.. “I’m sincere about helping folks get a blog out there. It’s incredibly easy and I think benefits us all to have more people online.” .. could have been lifted directly from the text of the book.
..migoi
Now, I certainly have to buy the book (or borrow it from the library). Maybe a book review is in order as well. I’d be happy to publish a review if you want to write it.
I think Fayetteville, and NWA to a lesser degree, have a pretty fertile, emerging blogosphere. The most exciting to me is when those blogs start talking to one another and new people decide they want to join the conversation with their own voice. Developing and cultivating that sort of decentralized local news network is my more ideological goal. I don’t want to control it, because it’s wonderfully chaotic and uncontrollable, I just want to participate in it.
The goal in print news was always objective and unbiased news. In my opinion, that goal as an absolute is impossible. No matter how hard you try, you are still the product of how you were raised, your perspective. That perspective is going to influence the questions you ask and what you consider to be an important news story.
Objective and unbiased are worthy thing to strive for. It’s my goal to always be honest to the facts and clearly label opinion versus news story.
The more people who are writing locally, the better news coverage will be overall, I think.
As opposed to having the “official news” arrive at their doorstep each morning in paper form, news consumers are savvy enough to take in news stories from several sources and work through all of it to arrive at their own conclusions.