Life As a Blogger

I have really enjoyed the past couple months as a blogger. And I’ll be the first to admit that blogging is HARD WORK. It requires quite a bit of discipline to continually find new stories and ideas that fit your beat, and then turn those in to actual posts. Especially with my topic of trying to find middle ground and showing both sides of an issue. The bloggers out there who are doing this several times a week have my utmost respect.

One way that blogging has changed me relates to how I perceive and interpret news stories. I guess you can say I now see things through a different lens. For me, continually writing about a certain topic forced me to look at things in a “how might I blog about this?” sort of way. In other words, a news update is no longer just a news update: it’s a topic for my blog and the possibility for me to bring about the type of change I wish to see.

Going forward, I will certainly be thinking about my beat topic but I doubt I will be blogging about it. To be honest, I never really got comfortable enough to publicize my work, and I am not one to write for the sake of writing. Instead, I will likely follow other bloggers and share their work so that similar types of change may still occur.

Overall, this has been a very rich learning experience for me. I feel armed with enough training to be a participant in the blogospehere, and perhaps I will be effective at promoting change by commenting on blogs and engaging other readers. If any one is interested in the topics of “all sides thinking”, “moderate politics”, or “media accuracy” I suggest checking out the following sites:

• The Moderate Voice
• Moderate Voters
• Accuracy in Media
• Connecting.the.Dots
• The New Moderate
• Polurls.com (Purple)

Thanks for reading!

-Dave