Saturday morning. The big juicy weekend edition of DeStandaard, a Flemish quality-newspaper, tumbles in the mailbox. All is quiet, I’m still asleep. Then my dad wakes me up and says: ‘Ey, you’re in the paper’.
Sweet. My first appearance in the written media that concerns this blog.
Of course, I just ‘get mentioned’ twice. That’s no big deal, I know. But still. Pretty cool.
So. What big important thing was it I have survived? Well, nothing really. I just went to a blog dinner and had a lot of fun jabbering about blogging, possibilities and future trends. The blog dinner did have a political tale, but that’s another story I’ve promised to Nathan’s political blog on the [politics.blognewschannel.com] site. I’ll post the link if it gets passed the critical editor in chief.
The article that has been published can also be read on the doppler wiki, which is exactly why this isn’t ‘just’ a news article. See, after the blogdinner, the journalist who was there, Bart Vanacker, started to write an article on the wiki which the bloggers then could extend or alter with personal contributions.
.
A total new way of journalism. Interactive online journalism, synergetically with a future release in the ‘written and printed’ press.
Still, the interactivity wasn’t a big success. The article had been changed about thirty times, according to the wiki-log, but no significant contributions have been made. You might wonder why this is. I can’t explain it for the others, but I can give you the reason why I didn’t contribute.
See, I love writing in my own style, preferrably in english. The mistakes every here and there are just cute, cause I’m not a native speaker. Though my words in dutch are more fluently written and spoken than they are in english, I saw no reason to interfere with the work of a professional. I’m just an amateur. I’m not a journalist, so I’m not going to write stuff that’ll appear in the printed media, next to or in addition to something pro.
That’s something totally different. I don’t have any ambitions in that direction, so I’ll just stick to the reading. Besides. What had been written by Bart in the first place totally pictured my night in Ghent. That’s the problem you have with ‘real’ journalists. They’ve learned to put things in such a way that everything has been said with as few/many words as necessary.
What can you possibly add to an article that already says everything that needs to be told?
So. I didn’t contribute. I just put up a funny face and get my picture taken. Works good enough for me to begin with.
Still. Flemish or Dutch visitors can tune in [here] for the article on the wiki, or [here] for a pdf. [right-click+save]
Blogs from people in the pic :
[VH's Flying Circus] – The One and Only Visual Hugo, ‘L’ugo vizuwel’ as they say in France.
[Blogologie]+[LiveFromBrussels] from Maarten Schenk.