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Archive for April 22nd, 2007

QOTD: Don’t write a story about mankind …

Sunday, April 22nd, 2007

“Don’t write a story about mankind; write a story about one man.”
— Unknown

I don’t know who said those words. I saw it a discussion board on facebook and thought it was spot on. But I wish I knew who’d said this quote. I tried to find it for a bit, but gave up. Anyone know?

Sometimes it’s easy to get so caught up in telling the big story that we forget that even the biggest story is only as important as the individual voices and lives impacted by it. That’s what the whole concept behind using “real people” and “show don’t tell.” It’s about finding the soul of the story. And that soul isn’t in statistics or a recent survey. It can’t be touched on by a salient quote from the institute of whatever it is your writing about or a comment from the legislator who proposed a law to start or end it. It’s in the real people living the story every day.

My LinkedIn “industry” dilemma

Sunday, April 22nd, 2007

So, I’m finally getting around to joining LinkedIn.

But I have a dilemma. I don’t know what industry to choose. It says to “Choose the industry that best describes your primary expertise,” but that is kind of hard.

I work for a newspaper. So, should I put newspapers? But does that brand me as old school and out of touch with the new media realities? There’s also online media, which might work for where I want to be in the future, but as I said in the beginning of this paragraph, I work for a newspaper. Most of my work goes to print, even if it hits the Web first.

There’s also media production, but that seems to sound more like radio or TV. Maybe it’s just the connotation I carry from the names of the sequences at my university. There’s also a broadcast media section, which obviously I don’t fit in.

I could just stick to writing and editing, or the even broader publishing. But even those don’t quite fit.

I ended up choosing newspapers, for now. You can see my page here, and connect with me if you like.

Before deciding on newspapers, I searched for several people I know or work with to see what they listed, and they’re kind of all over the place. There really isn’t one broad “news” or “media” section, which kind of threw me off as it forced me to pick a camp I’m not entirely comfortable picking. I may reevaluate that decision later on. Any thoughts on whether it was the best pick for now?