Introducing Journalism.me
My latest project has finally launched: Journalism.me. Please, check it out and share the link.
The project actually came from a tweet by Jay Rosen, who wanted to know if a list of 20-something year old journalism bloggers existed. To my knowledge, none existed at the time.
I set out to create a definitive — but ever expanding! — list of young journalism bloggers and just provide it as a simple resource. But then I got to thinking that maybe I could do more than just a list.
(Clarification: I am accepting blogs to be added to the blogroll from anyone of any age. There’s no age limit to be included on the site.)
So, I bought the domain name “journalism.me” and went to work building a list of not just young journalism bloggers, but a more general list of personal blogs by journalists who blog about journalism. Yes, I’m aware of how meta this is.
My criteria eliminated blogs written in an official capacity for a newspaper or news organization. The point here was to find personal blogs, not work blogs. I also didn’t include blogs that were basically resume/clips sites that copy/pasted one’s work. I’m more interested in what people have to say about their jobs and the field itself. I also would not be including group blogs, blogs from journalism institutions or news blogs.
So, what you end up with is a collection of individual voices discussing journalism all focused in one place. Hopefully, the site will drive traffic to their blogs and connect them with each other.
To do this, I took the RSS feeds from each blogger and fed them through Feed Informer. The problem with Feed Informer is that it only lets you compile 15 feeds into one digest, however, you are allowed six digests. So, I could have up to 90 feeds in six digests. Right now I’m using three digest feeds and taking those and putting them through Yahoo! Pipes.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Why didn’t you just start with Yahoo! Pipes?” The answer is complicated. That’s what I originally did, but ran into some problems with the RSS feed it spit out. It wasn’t valid and I wasn’t able to embed it into the site unless I used their badge widget. Unfortunately, the Yahoo! Pipes badges don’t display properly in Internet Explorer 7 (Firefox 3 and Safari were OK).
After feeding the three Feed Informer digest feeds into Yahoo! Pipes, I took that Pipes output feed and fed it back to Feed Informer so I could format/style the final feed and put it on Journalism.me as it currently looks now. Talk about a work around! Now, I’m sure there are ways to avoid this complicated mess, but for now it works and I’m sticking with it.
In addition to the main feed, I’ve also started a del.icio.us account to follow a number of these bloggers and see what bookmarks they are sharing. Del.icio.us automatically combines these bookmarks when you add users to your network and spits out handy feed, which I also used Feed Informer to embed in the site.
That’s about it! If you have a personal blog, please e-mail me at kiyoshimartinez@gmail.com and I’ll add it to the network. Also, if you add user journalismdotme to your del.icio.us network, I’ll add you in return and your bookmarks will be shared, too.
Enjoy and spread the word.
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