Why blog?

When I started this blog, blogs were dead exciting. They were the Future. They were New Media, and I was a new journalist, and I desperately loved working online. I wanted to throw myself into the exciting new future of online journalism as hard as I possibly could, so I did the best thing I could think of: I started writing about online journalism, as a sort of add-on to my day job, writing in the cracks. I read everything I could find. I used to get home after 10-hour days writing and demand my brain to produce something else, another few hundred words of analysis or a quick pointer to something else interesting on the internet that someone had said, because I thought it was hugely important.

It was. Honestly, it was. I treated it with such seriousness, and I’m pretty sure that without it I wouldn’t have moved on in the way that I have. Blogging made me, in some ways more than newsrooms did: blogging made me think about reaching specific audiences, it honed my research and collaboration skills, it made me capable of synthesising an argument in 500 words for humans (rather than 2,000 words for academics), it stopped me being scared of speaking my mind in public. What it did for me has been invaluable.

Then I moved on. I started work at the Guardian, and that has a certain chilling effect on writing: for one thing, I can’t use this blog to kvetch about minor work frustrations, because Private Eye exists. There’s a tendency for some people to think that if a journalist works for a national or international news organisation, their words in a personal space reflect back on that organisation. And there’s also the fact that a great many of the things I worked on at the Guardian have been the things I couldn’t work on back when I started out. There’s no need to come home and get fired up about online journalism when I can put that fire to action at work. That’s a very satisfying place to be.

But blogging matters. Late last year, inspired by Adam Tinworth, I tried to blow the dust off this place and pick up the pace a little: I forced myself to write about something every day for ten days. Sometimes games, sometimes journalism, sometimes politics, sometimes creative work, sometimes criticism, sometimes just notes – a broader palette than the one I started with, and perhaps a more mature one. (Perhaps a more confusing one; I’ve stopped trying to separate those parts of my life, because each of them informs all of the others, but if you’re looking for a single-subject blog I can imagine the combination can be strange.)

Since then I’ve slacked off somewhat, but since the new year started I’ve been trying to write posts with ideas in them, thoughts or analysis or at least contextualising a link to something else. One a week at least, on top of the weekly Pocket Lint email. In fact, that Pocket Lint links post every Saturday is a deliberate strategy to force myself to write more: I don’t want my blog to only consist of links posts, like the Delicious-powered graveyards that scattered the web a few years back, when everyone stopped writing and just auto-posted links instead.

Adam’s currently doing another challenge: one month of 500-word posts, substantive things, every day. He linked to this post on writing yourself into existence:

Once you have a blog you notice more, you start to think “I might write about this on my blog” “What do I want to say?” “What will people’s reaction be?”. Over time you get better at noticing and the better at noticing you get the more noticed you get! You end up in the wonderful collective web of “Oooh that’s interesting” which I now wouldn’t ever want to be without.

That’s right. When I wasn’t blogging, I wasn’t thinking about what I read in the same way. Now, finding myself falling out of the habit after a couple of months, that’s a useful reminder to keep writing, to keep sharing what I find interesting, as much for the process of finding, thinking, synthesising and creating as for publishing the end result. Blogging’s been very good for me. I should be doing it more.

Back to blogging: 10 reasons for 10 days

Starting my first Livejournal was not the only questionable decision I made in 2004.
Starting my first Livejournal was not the only questionable decision I made in 2004.
  1. This is all @adders’s fault.
  2. I used to blog all the time. I used to have a serious writing work ethic. I’ve blogged in many formats under multiple names since 2004, or thereabouts, which makes me a bit of a youthful whippersnapper in terms of some of the internet. But it’s nearly a decade now, and that’s too much waffling on the internet to throw away just because I’m busy.
  3. I’m out of practise. I’m rusty. I used to write for a living; now I’m more on the production side, and my writing is suffering for lack of daily use. This is not a muscle I should allow to atrophy.
  4. Side projects are brilliant, and I like to have at least six on the go at the same time, because there is something wrong with me. My blog hasn’t been on that list for far too long.
  5. Writing things through is a superb way to refine an argument, distill an insight or open a debate. Writing makes me better at thinking.
  6. I used to yammer on about how important it was for a digitally-savvy journalist to have a blog and get themselves out there on the wide wide interwebs. Just because I’m happy with where I’m at, and pouring a great deal of energy and inspiration and activity into my day job, doesn’t mean that advice doesn’t still hold true.
  7. I know a whole bunch of stuff about some extremely esoteric internet subjects now. Maybe some people might find some of that useful. I should share.
  8. I have a whole bunch of opinions and knowledge about games and other culture, about storytelling more broadly, about politics and events. I have a lot of experience of making game things in liminal spaces. Maybe some people might find some of that interesting. It can all share space together with the media stuff here and cross-pollinate, the way it does in my brain.
  9. One of the things making Detritus has viscerally re-taught me (more on that in a coming blog post!) is that what actually matters in my personal work is making things. If they’re well received and widely read, that’s absolutely brilliant. But what matters more is that they exist at all.
  10. I didn’t want to do ten days of blogging every day on my own, so I sort of challenged Grant. He’s a far, far better and more entertaining writer than I am, and I really enjoy reading what he writes. I’m basically just doing this so that he writes more. It’s entirely selfish.