Throw Out the Rulebook — Blog This Instant
Posted on Monday, October 26th, 2009
My last blog got me wondering whether there are good vs. bad times to post blogs. Many say to blog weekly, same day/same time, just like an old print columnist. Maybe I’m a hopeless contrarian: My gut tells me that such conventional ideas on output & deadlines don’t apply in social media.
I grew up, professionally speaking, in the print media world, where content is due at an exact day & hour and must fill a precise number of column inches. For one job I churned out 120 pages of text per month — all the news, features, editorials, briefs, photos & cutlines, even jokes — destined for conversion, in assembly line fashion, to a 32-page glossy trade rag. The overriding law I lived by: Ensure that the content fits the physical parameters of the magazine’s tabloid format. Not one word over. Not a comma less.
What if there hadn’t been 32 page’s worth of copy for the month, or alternately, if the industry I covered suddenly exploded with newsworthy events? Then copy was inflated or shrunk as needed, so it fit.
One evening in January 1982 I fell asleep reading a Business Week story on Reuters’ online commodity news service. That night I had a dream… Walking along the wharf in Georgetown, I came upon a six-story office building made entirely of glass — not a bolt, nail or shingle in sight. Crystal white light streamed in and bounced back, magnified 100-fold… When I awoke I realized I’d had a vision of where my own industry was headed: information, delivered pure and unobstructed, when and where people needed it.
The next day I launched a company to make good this vision and help usher in an era of information unrestricted and un-ruled: ElectroNews, touted as “the world’s first online interactive financial news and advisory service.” Never mind that the name sounded like a popular vacuum cleaner (It’s delightfully corny by today’s standards — still makes me double over with laughter), or that the idea was so far ahead of its time that I lost every nickel I owned on it. It was the right idea. Today we see its offspring, and that of many far finer pioneering efforts, by the 10s of thousands on the World Wide Web.
The basic premise of ElectroNews: I would provide valuable, timely content when it was valuable and timely, without regard for volume, length or arbitrary deadlines. Only one time frame mattered: This Instant. If that meant managing a flood of content so I could post stories 24/7, so be it. But if nothing newsworthy arose for days or weeks at a time, that, too, was just fine. Content could/would be as long or short as the story merited: I determined never to write anything merely to fill space. Period.
I think these rules still count today, in social media.
So when I read on a popular blogger’s site that she “posts new content every Thursday,” my heart goes out to her. I get this image of the poor woman at the mercy of self-imposed deadline tyranny. There she sits each Wednesday night, struggling to come up with something to say when, perhaps, she really has nothing. Or maybe she’s swamped with great stories & unable to do them justice all at once. Or perhaps she has a brilliant idea on Monday, but feels compelled to sit on it for three days. Such a life strikes me as a different kind of dream — a nightmare.
Been there, done that. Won’t go there ever again.
Neither should you. The beauty of the Internet in all its forms: It’s instantaneous — and eternal. Timely — and timeless. It’s often said that information wants to be free. What about us?
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