Blogging on other people's blogs

Journalism. I knew that, that was the field I wanted to forever be apart of since I was in first grade. It came natural for me to want to look at blogs about this particular subject. I had even looked at a few upon entering this class, let alone have to blog about one.

I was picky when it came to selecting the one I wanted to analyze/write about. Be an audience, be an audience. The words of Morgan, my classmates and Rebecca Blood were circulating in my already racked brain. I looked at several journalism blogs. Some were good, some were poor, and some I just plain didn't understand. There were just some many and none were even a little bit close to being similar. I don't know what it was about the teaching online journalism blog that caught my eye. Maybe it was the fact that I have only known of face to face teaching to become a good journalist. Could it really be effectively learned online? I wanted to find out.

Mindy McAdams was the lady of the hour. Well, the hour I dedicated to step two of this exercise. She was the creator of the Teaching Online Journalism blog and a professor of journalism way down in Florida. As stated in her profile, she teaches university courses about online journalism and changes in the ways we use technologies for communication. She loves seeing multimedia used well to tell journalism stories.

When looking at any blog, I have the habit of first looking at the profile and just reading the author's interests. Mindy, I'm going to go with a first name basis here, likes journalism (duh), storytelling, The Matrix, and Bruce Springstein to name a few points of interest that seemed to pop out to me. As I was looking at her interests I noticed she had another blog entitled "Scooters USA." At first, I thought it was another journalism blog. No, no, it was actually about scooters. A little odd, but I liked its rarity all the same.

Anyway, back to my focal blog. One of the first features I explored on Mindy's blog was what she blogs about. Pretty self explanatory. She has a listing of things that interest her enough to blog about them. They all deal with journalism and other electronic web features. One of the interesting things about this list was that each item listed was linked to further information. I clicked on a few of them to see where else Mindy redirected her audience. There were no listings under books; I assumed that was in the process. When I clicked on photojournalism I was brought to a list of post by Mindy related to the topic. One of the posting was titled People who love photography and people who love stories. I read the post, which was rather short, and it was about transition of journalists to photographers and vise versa. Mindy was explaining in her post that photojournalism was a sort of happy medium for those out there that loved to, well, take pictures and tell stories. The posting revolves around an interview with Rob Finch, who has made such transitions within the two fields. Mindy touches on the interview only briefly, but reluctantly has a link to the full story, which I went on to read. Finch's background is fascinating. The experience he has is what I desire and admire. Finch offers photographs of his photojournalistic journey and offers insight to internship information. The interview, which gets pretty lengthy, is definitely worth reading. Even if his or my current audience doesn't want to read it in full, the photographs are amazingly worthwhile to check out.

Ok, back on track to Mindy's blog. She openly gives her audience a list of stuff she is confident they'll be interested in. The section of her blog was true voice speaking. Mindy was reaching out and giving tips on what else to look for if curiosity arose in this field. Under the stuff we, as readers, were thought to like, were books about online journalism, cool gear for solo mojos, such as digital cameras and voice recorders, and books for web or wanna be web designers. Mindy was right, those interested in her blog, would for sure want to explore her further suggestions.

As long as I'm exploring the right hand side of Mindy's blog, I'll also mention she has a listing of sites she likes to visit and what she thinks her audience should visit. What I liked best about this feature was that she titled it "What I like to visit." Her listing includes the BBC News, Journalism Jobs, J-Lab, which is The Institute for Interactive Journalism, and more. To me, this says that although this blog is obviously set up for the public to view and find beneficial, it is also for Mindy. As Rebecca Blood states in her book, the blogger needs to have a blog for themselves. Good for Mindy.

Mindy McAdams is by no means a newer blogger. Her archive dates back to December 2005 and has regular postings every month until the current date. I like bloggers like Mindy. As a true journalist, she never runs out of things to say. Of course, as we all know, there are definitely days where there is just nothing to blog about, however, with Mindy, she makes up for it in her daily lengthy postings. Her postings are personal, however, as I read into them, I find myself noticing that Mindy's blog really falls under the notebook type category. Although, there are so many links to other blogs and websites, through blog rolls and basic phrase clicking, on Mindy's blog that also makes it seem as if it were a filter. I ping-ponged back and forth, while trying to decide which one it might be when I finally concluded that her blog is a little bit of all three types. Impressive.

Mindy's most recent posts, along with almost all of them, were very interesting to read. The posting on February 8th was about Arthur Sulzberger, owner and publisher of The New York Times. She included a quote from Sulzberger that made me laugh: "I really don't know whether we'll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don't care either."

"The idea behind this blog is that it can serve as a place to keep my notes, observations and ideas about teaching. Mostly what I teach concerns online journalism. I also teach about the Internet as a communication medium and about technologies of communication in general." This quote was pulled from one of Mindy's first posts. Several, if not almost all, are all over the place when it comes to journalism. Some are about her thoughts and frustrations about teaching an online course, others, like the one about Arthur Sulzberger, were just plain good writing.

I think that just by reading Mindy's blog, an audience member can become a better writer. As soon as I typed that previous sentence I darted back to Rebecca Blood's advice about writing like someone else for a little while, but still finding your own voice. Before I really didn't know if that was doable, however, after reading through a few handfuls of Mindy's posts, I saw myself putting my writing into words like hers. Ah, the point of her blog.

I could go on for pages and pages about where I found myself by clicking and reading on Mindy's blog. It seemed literally endless. I decide to conclude after I've covered highlights, lowlights, and maybe even touched on the in between. As a hopeful future journalist and successful blogger, I have made Mindy's blog a top-of-the-list favorite. I know that I will often refer back to her blog, not because I want to study journalism online (which I grew to find out wasn't the main purpose of the blog, like I had originally thought) but because I am fascinated by the knowledge and talent Mindy holds.