Tweet February is National Blog Posting Month. If you didn’t know that, you’re forgiven. I found out about it from Summer Beretsky, who got it from Blog Her. The effort is similar to National Novel Writing Month, which occurs in November. But NaBloPoMo is slightly different. Here’s how National Blog Posting Month works Actually, every month [...]

Tweet The Cleveland Collage Project aims to assemble portrait of Greater Cleveland that is inclusive, accurate, nuanced and complete. It’s my reaction to the Rust Belt coverage I’ve seen in national media like the Washington Post, the New York Times and CBS. I’m not saying the stories weren’t accurate. I’m saying they were framed. What [...]

Tweet When we were doing journalism the old-fashioned way, I didn’t have to promote my work, just write it. I liked that until I started writing books. My reviews were great but my sales, not so much. But that was 10 years ago. Now I’m blogging, tweeting daily. I’ve got one eye on my Facebook [...]

Tweet Writing organizations give prizes for all sorts of stuff. Some group should set up an award for best Tweets, similar to the awards given for best headlines. The first prize should go to a certain employee at the Washington Post. I don’t who this person is, or whether it is a single person. But [...]

Tweet Way before the advent of blog posts, when the telegraph was a technological innovation, reporters had a problem. The transmission system wasn’t reliable. Sometimes, all of their dispatches would get through, but other times entire portions dropped out. So the medium inspired a transformation. The writers put the most important information in the beginning [...]

Tweet For the last week, I’ve been investigating ways to create better blog posts. I’ve had my head stuck in Content Rules, a great book that goes from theory to examples to case studies. I’ve already mentioned Pushing Social. Stan, the publisher, is creating a series on writing better posts. You can subscribe by email. [...]

Tweet Tuesday night, I participated in a writers’ panel at a trendy Cleveland bar. Yep, a bar. The Happy Dog, to be exact. The place was packed with folks ready, willing and able to debate how writers should depict Cleveland. The event kicked off “Write to Assemble,” a “writer-centric” gathering held on the second Tuesday [...]

Tweet This is the year I do more with social media, including and especially blogging. There’s lots of hype about blogging, but essentially it’s a online publication.  To be successful, a blog must be updated regularly. Now some folks I know can post two and three times a day. I don’t have it like that. [...]

Tweet Update I’ve only been working on this series a week, but the response has been fantastic. We’ve gotten followers, suggestions and comments. My favorites so far: The Bessers who recognized their grandfather’s store in our first photo; the children of Gail Kirschenbaum Bash, who contributed a story about her recycling efforts. I’m learning quite [...]

Tweet The trend toward multimedia means writers must do more than put words on paper. They have to think about capturing content in various forms. When it comes to audio, the Olympus TP7 pickup is a perfect device for recording telephone interviews. Here are three reasons I give it five stars: 1) It’s easy to [...]