Citizen Journalism: A Primer
The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism’s “2009 State of News Media” report contains an interesting section on citizen journalism. The report concedes that there has been a growing number of citizen-media sites, but that “citizen news sites provided much less reporting (57%), as well as opinion and special content like calendar items” on the [...]
Blogging for Beginners
So, you have a brand-spanking-new blog and a million and one ideas and the energy to be a prolific blogger. Yet you pause, asking: “Do I really know what I’m doing?” Many media consultants now assume that clients have basic blogging skills, much like they assume clients know how to use a computer. That said, although anyone [...]
Web Essentials
Most companies (or free agents) use a Web site as the central hub of their marketing program. This is a good thing; a well-designed Web site can not only add value for clients and help to “wow” prospects, but it can also be invaluable for the business, too — facilitating file transfers, payments, orders, and [...]
Business Card Clinic
The first public face of a business or association may well be the single thing most often overlooked by entrepreneurs — the humble business card. Cards have been around for decades, and different cultures employ them in different ways. In Korea, for example, business cards often omit phone numbers, because numbers are frequently reassigned. In [...]
Blogging: The New Career Path
Once upon a time, an aspiring writer — especially one who dreamed of scaling the heights of Mount Commentariat — would start his career as a print journalist at a no-name newspaper, telling the compelling stories of the day, like how Fireman Jones rescued not one but two cats from a tree on Wednesday. In [...]
Electronic Mail
The allure of email — you can send a message to anyone, at any time, and you don’t need to worry about what you write because, hey, it’s just email, right? The biggest challenge with email is that there is a significant generational gap among email users. For people who came of age in an [...]
Masculine Preferred … ?
It is, bar none, the most contentious disagreement in English grammar: What gender of pronoun is used to refer to a single person whose sex is unknown? Grammar purists seek refuge behind a syntactical construction called the “masculine preferred” — that is, absent a clear reference to the sex of the person in question, we should use the [...]
Pitfalls of Clipart
It looks so cute — that little line-art graphic of a cat to match your pet-grooming company’s theme. That rainbow-colored butterfly for your yoga studio. A Celtic cross for your letterhead as a public witness of your Christianity. The zodiac symbol that you identify with. Clipart is everywhere, like mosquitoes at an evening cookout. Done correctly, clipart [...]
P.S. — I Can’t Think Clearly
A postscript to a formal letter is best used rarely — and that, as a handwritten supplement to a letter that has already been printed. Yes, postscripts are common on solicitation letters. But most formal correspondence isn’t intended to solicit a donation. Some writers are addicted to postscripts; they use them liberally, and believe that [...]
English =/= German
People have a tendency to capitalize their English as if it were German, with pretty much all nouns capitalized. You know, the People whose Spelling and Grammar needs remedial Education. The standard rule in English is that proper nouns are capitalized, and that common nouns are not. A “proper” noun is a word that refers [...]