http://strom.com/awards/341.html
You folks, my adoring Web Informant public, have sent me
close to $30,000 of your money during the past four years. Sadly (for me), none
of this money has ended up in my pocket: All has gone for some good cause or
another, for which I am (and those causes most
certainly are) grateful and appreciative. The outpouring of your
generosity illustrates just how close the relationship is between writer and
reader, especially within this electronic context.
Take Chris Allbritton, a former AP and Daily News reporter who
now can be found at www.back-to-iraq.com.
Allbritton collected about $15K in a single
request earlier this year. His purpose was somewhat more prosaic than mine: to
have his audience pay his travel expenses to
report on the Iraqi war, or whatever it is called now that the war is
officially over. He and his laptop and phone snuck over the Turkish border in
March. It is in response to writers such as Allbritton
that the Columbia Journalism Review has noted, "Not that anyone in
the public can perhaps be a journalist, but that anyone who is a journalist can
have a mini-public on the Net."
And what better way to tie yourself to your readers than
to ask them to open their wallets. Let me tell you, it works and works well.
Adam Engst runs TidBITS.com and supports himself on reader contributions and
advertising -- and he has about 10x my readership (of which
I am envious). And I am not envious of Karyn Bosnak, who got several thousand
dollars from her readers to get her out of shopping debt and a book deal too.
So you can see that the whole notion of your role, as reader, and
my role, as writer, is changing by the minute. Witness the explosion of blogs
around the Net, telling you probably more than you want to know about their
authors' daily life. In doing some research on a mathematician today, for example, I found out that she is planning on
marrying her domestic partner. Now, I really didn't need to know she was gay--
not that there is anything wrong with that-- or how long her relationship had
been going on, or her cats' names and diets, etc.
Blogs just make it easier for writers, or
would-be writers, to vent and share. They, together with e-mail and discussion
groups, are closing the gap between writer and reader. I remember when I started Network
Computing magazine -- back in the early 1990s -- when it was controversial to
list an author's e-mail address at the end of the article. Now such contact info can routinely be found on mastheads,
and in many daily newspapers and magazines, too. And letters to the editor are
routinely published with e-mail addresses in some publications.
It is this sense of connectedness between author and
reader, and the sharing of ideas going both ways across the Net that ties us
all together. And it isn't so much pure technology but a sense that we are all
in this endeavor together. Sometimes I have taken a reader's note to me and
turned it into a Web Informant essay. Some might call this lazy, and some might
call this being co-opted, when the lines between reader and writer get fuzzier.
I like to think that I am on the cutting edge of journalism.
We at VARBusiness routinely quote from, celebrate with,
and share panels at conferences with our readers, the top computer salespeople
and channel marketing executives. Does that make us worse for the wear and
tainted journalists? I don't think so. We get to serve our audience better
because we spend so much time with them, and understand what they are thinking
and what their concerns and challenges are, not to mention their favorite foods
and pastimes and local sports teams.
The same thing is happening with Allbritton. He took his
"assignment" to Iraq seriously, and spent lots of time listening to
his "public." He would follow up on suggestions from his readers --
after all, they were footing the bill. My own situation with Web Informant is
similar. I get tons of e-mail reactions after each piece and suggestions for
follow up and expanding these essays, not to mention the massive outpouring of
charitable giving from all over the world when I take off for my next bike
ride.
And don't worry, if you are feeling left out or have some extra money to donate, I will be in touch.
Entire contents copyright 2003 by David Strom,
Inc.
David Strom, dstrom@cmp.com, +1 (516) 562-7151
Port Washington NY 11050
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