Sue's Place

Out of the bluea few weeks ago when I really needed it, Elma Sabo, Ideas/Books Editor for the N&R, contacted me about writing a piece for the Ideas section of the paper. It was published today. Quote from Elma:

Thought I would send you the piece as it now reads. I edited the ending a bit. Let me know if there’s anything you can’t live with. If you want to, you are free to post your piece online once it comes out in the paper on Sunday… We will not have an online link at our Web site. Most of Ideas is not online.

(Given the picture that Joe Rodriguez snapped at ConvergeSouth and I failed to destroy, it’s a good thing^TM that it’s not online. I thought he was my friend.)

When I asked Elma, “How many words?” she gave me a figure and added, “More is better.” That’s like asking a Weight Watcher if she wants more chocolate cake.

This was one of my first hands-on watching-the-editing process and it wasn’t painful at all. Elma’s good; I’m verbose. The headline, “Are bloggers REAL journalists?” was kind of humorous because I’ve got a sentence that reads, “The blogging vs. journalism argument is an illegitimate dichotomy.” John Robinson’s comment is here.

But all in all, it was a wonderful experience, a nice bit of “Me!” time, and quite a piece of artwork they found. Because the article isn’t posted online, you can read it below as Elma sent it to me, save for one comma I removed in the paste after the jump.

Blogging, which is shoe-horned somewhere between reporting and commentary, is a work in progress. To some die-hard journalists who rose through the ranks of flip-over notebooks and pencil behind the ear, bloggers must seem as interlopers in their coffee-cup-littered offices. Considered not quite reporters by some traditionalists but legitimate by others, bloggers threw off their bathrobes a significant time ago and walked straight into the White House. Witness blogger Garrett Graff’s joining the White House Press Corps in March 2005.

Greensboro is the ground zero of community blogging. The small but ever-expanding bounty of bloggers is inclusive and evangelizes the conversational opportunities possible with blogging in Greensboro and beyond.

Bloggers and blog readers visit the online world when time permits; I’ve yet to hear of a Greensboro blogger who fails to balance blogging, reading blogs, work and family. You pick up a news magazine and I click a link. My news is faster and I still manage to plant flowers outside.

As critical readers grow weary of TV news-with-an-agenda or paid “journalists” acting merely as apologists for red or blue propaganda machines, bloggers turn the TV off and discover breaking news in the online world. Click a link and read a counterpoint. Click again to discover refutation. Provoke your mind with questions asked by others and respond without yelling at a TV screen.

When being online was new, very few of my neighbors had Internet connections. The first cable modem in Greensboro was installed in my home, and now countless high-speed connections dot the local landscape. Where the computer goes is a fundamental home design question.

A growing presence

Individuals blog. Families blog. As London’s Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner is a model of freedom of speech, blogging is an international outgrowth of the celebration of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment. The blogging vs. journalism argument is an illegitimate dichotomy.

In a Salon.com article, Scott Rosenberg wrote that “the editorial process of the blogs takes place between and among bloggers, in public, in real time, with fully annotated cross-links.” This played out personally when News & Record editor John Robinson corrected a fact in my blog several months back. Instead of erasing the mistake, I crossed it out for the world to see and inserted the correction with full credit to John’s helpful blue pencil. Bloggers are accountable, whether or not they ask for editing. [Online only: that post is here]

Blogs are the new market for advertising. Business Week online writes, “Now advertisers are realizing there is a market emerging in the blogosphere. Already, the growth in regular online advertising, estimated to be about 35% this year, will far outpace the spending increases for any other sector of the media world. Add to all this the fact that about 11% of Internet users today are inveterate blog readers, and the blogging scene starts to get mighty compelling for marketers.”

Do blogs live alongside traditional media or are they the tail that wags the dog? No print publication like the News & Record can cover all the local news. There’s too much of it, some doesn’t suit our community, and financial realities don’t allow for universal coverage. Blogs are national and international. There are no community boundaries for blogs.

Old-fashioned reporting is, well, old-fashioned. Bloggers bemoaned the failures of the investigative media for almost five years, and it took the tragedy of a national disaster like Hurricane Katrina to resuscitate reporters. At ConvergeSouth, a blogging conference held this October at N.C. A&T, we discussed how online hurricane reporting surpassed print and TV coverage. In this instance, bloggers may have shamed traditional journalists into acting like journalists again, and when they did, we cheered.

Eyes on Greensboro

Many people in town might ignore blogging, but people elsewhere are watching Greensboro because of it.

The ConvergeSouth conference, with its racial diversity, gender mix and focus on citizen politics, announced Greensboro’s emergence on the country’s economic and online radar.

Of the topics on which we focused at ConvergeSouth, these affected the city the most:

Racial diversity. By working with A&T, we achieved a racially diverse tech conference, a significant achievement since the blogging world is seen as dominated by young white men. Many of those attending commented positively about our diversity and what they learned from having new voices in the conversation, thereby crediting Greensboro with staking a seat at the online lunch counter of racial equality, much the same way four brave young men from A&T had done just a few miles away 45 years earlier.

Wrote Mickey McLean, who led our breakout session on faith blogging, “[I]t was so nice to have white and black Christians come together at a conference such as ConvergeSouth, but it would be even more wonderful if we could find ways to worship more together.”

Gender mix. Bora Zivkovic, a Chapel Hill blogger, has noted on his blog, Science and Politics, the male hierarchy within the blogosphere. Yet, BlogHer, a critically acclaimed West Coast conference that evangelizes blogging by, for and to women, is successful at getting women to blog. Likewise, ConvergeSouth smashed perceived and real blogging gender barriers. New bloggers, many of them women, emerged online after ConvergeSouth.

New politics. Blogs are a growing political phenomenon. They enable elected officials to respond to constituents as well as tell their message in their own words. Greensboro City Council member Sandy Carmany is on the national forefront as a political blogger.

Political blogging dominated several conversations at ConvergeSouth. Some items overheard at a conference dinner:

Raleigh-based Kevin Howarth, who blogs at Narcissistic Graffiti, “Now, after I ran into [a friend] at ConvergeSouth, I found out he not only has a blog, but he’s also running for office! … [my friend] spoke about how he’s using his blog as part of his political strategy… How cool is that?”

It’s very cool. Greensboro’s David Hoggard, a blogger who ran for City Council, already did that. What’s new in Raleigh already had happened in Greensboro.

Chris Nolan, at spot-on.com, writes, “Technology changes politics in subtle ways. In Greensboro, N.C., blogging is a way of life, and users are focused on the message, not on the technology. They use the Web to raise money to help ailing neighbors, run political campaigns or talk back to – or above – the local newspaper, to air their points of view on local issues.”

Economic impact. Says Darren Rowse of Problogger, who claims to help bloggers earn money, “A recent Blogads.com campaign by Audi brought about some pretty staggering results with 29% of traffic to their Audi A3 promotional Website coming from BlogAds. The amazing part is that the BlogAds costs were just 1.5% of their total ad spend for the campaign. Now that is a good return on investment!”

Schools often have career days in which students have an opportunity to interact with doctors, lawyers and other workers. The schools rarely have programmers or Web developers represented and so unintentionally deprive students of employment avenues. Do schools do that on purpose? No. But often those who arrange career opportunity days don’t have contacts in emerging online fields and don’t have the resources to find them. ConvergeSouth put the two groups face to face.

U.S. Rep. Sue Myrick (R-Charlotte), sent staff two years ago to meet with me in my volunteer role as chairwoman of the Business IT Council for the Guilford County Schools. They wanted to discuss technology education as an alternative to the loss of textile jobs in her district. Charlotte knows that Guilford Schools has the world’s first Red Hat Academy (developing students to work in a Red Hat Linux environment), but I am sure that’s news to many in Greensboro.

One of ConvergeSouth’s goals was to put Greensboro on the radar of emerging-tech businesses so they’d know we have the talent (and the territorial assets, diversity tolerance and technology workers) to fill their needs as they grow. You can bring a business here, and you can live well here.

With the vision supported by the Tannenbaum-Sternberger Foundation, the Bryan Foundation, and JP Financial, a small group of volunteers changed the way the technologically in-crowd views Greensboro.

ConvergeSouth was a big first step in cementing the Greensboro blogging community as the epicenter of blogging to the rest of the world. With free and open wireless connectivity in Center City Park and soon to launch on South Elm Street, we hope that local denizens will learn some more and determine if joining the online conversation, and through it the rest of the world, is the right path for them.

Those promoting new careers won’t ask which side of the digital divide you are on; they will expect workers competent and conversant in new media. Bloggers are working to keep Greensboro 30 seconds ahead of that curve.