Guest Post - All for one and one for all: why writer communities
One of the more interesting features of the 2010 Blogathon is today's guest post exchange day. Blogathon participants have wandered about the Internet to post on each other's blogs. Visiting Lascher at Large today is Michelle Rafter, a freelance business and technology reporter who blogs about freelancing and new media at WordCount: Freelancing in the Digital Age and organized the Blogathon. In today's appearance at Lascher at Large Rafter discusses what she's learned about community and writers through putting together the Blogathon. I, meanwhile, can be found on her site discussing the Oregon News Incubator.
Anyhow, here's what Michelle wrote:
Writing is a solitary endeavor. Even if your favorite place to write is a crowded coffee shop, in the end it’s just you and your laptop.
Being part of a writing community doesn’t take away the pain of getting the words on the page. But exchanging tips, opinions and war stories with other writers provides a level of support you can’t get from the random guy sipping a caramel macchiato next to you at Starbucks.
I’ve blogged a lot about the importance of belonging to writing tribes, whether in a newsroom if you’re lucky enough to still be a staff reporter, in the city where you live if there’s an SPJ chapter or other organized journalism group, or online through a virtual writers’ group such as the Online News Association, Freelance Success, or UPOD.
This sense of writers as community hit home again in a big way during the early days of this year’s WordCount Blogathon.
Every May, I host a blogathon where freelancers, reporters, copywriters and other writers with blogs commit to posting every day of the month. This year, more than 110 writers registered before the official deadline and another dozen or so joined after the fact.
That’s a lot of people – more than twice the number that signed up last year – and an enormous opportunity for interaction. Before this year’s blogathon, I thought about providing some mechanism for blogathoners to talk to each other. Then I got buried with administrative details and decided a hashtag on Twitter, #blog2010, that people could use to swap short comments would have to do.
Right about then, blogathon participant and Arizona writer Rebecca Allen offered to help set up a WordCount Blogathon Google Group – and the rest is history.
Since the first week of May, almost 90 percent of the people in the blogathon have joined the Google Group. From day one there’ve been lively exchanges, on blogging mechanics, linking etiquette, advertising and finding the demographics of blog subscribers to name just a few. People used it to find partners for today’s blog post exchange, follow each other on Twitter and sign up for each other’s Facebook fan pages.
The Google Group has inspired blogathoners to create other devices for interacting. Dylan, who blogs at DiscordianZen put together an RSS feed that groups all 110+ blogs in the Blogathon onto one page, super handy for jumping from one blog to another. Tracy Doerr, another, blogger decided to do an interview series featuring other blogathoners and used the Google Group to ask for interview volunteers.
The group has united people in ways I wouldn’t have thought of. It epitomizes the hub and spoke nature of the Internet, where communication flows throughout the system and not just from the top down. It’s also made me to feel like a guest at the party and not just the harried host too busy filling drinks and emptying the ashtrays to join the conversation.
Bill Lascher is involved in his own writing community experiment as part of the Oregon News Incubator, which he’s posting about on my WordCount blog today.
A mutual journalist friend of ours, Abraham Hyatt, created yet another writing community after running a one-day digital journalism workshop here in Portland last year. The Digital Journalism Portland group has met a few times since then, with writers, editors, freelancers and representatives from new media startups mingling and keeping up with what’s happening in the industry here and elsewhere.
If enough writers think it’s worthwhile, I’ll keep the Google Group going after the blogathon ends so people can continue asking questions and helping each other in a friendly, low-key environment.
These examples prove that opportunities are out there for writers to build communities, whether virtual or physical. Sometimes all it takes is a bit of out-of-the-box thinking, an extra hour or two at the computer, and not settling for a lonely table at a crowded Starbucks.
