Here are a few of my ideas:
What are your thoughts?
(Note: Additional resources available at http://bit.ly/futureofobits)
Here are a few of my ideas:
What are your thoughts?
(Note: Additional resources available at http://bit.ly/futureofobits)
People occasionally ask me what it is that I do for a living. They know I’m a journalist. They know I write for The Huffington Post. They know I work the graveyard shift from my home in New Hampshire. Still they wonder, “What’s a typical night like?”
Here’s one of the greatest things about my job: There is no typical night.
Working as a journalist on the graveyard shift is very similar to being a firefighter. Some nights you’re busy putting out fires and other nights you’re just sitting at the fire house, honing your skills, waiting for a fire to happen. The key thing is, you’re on duty when the fire breaks out. Or in my case, when news occurs.
During a typical week, I’ll cover one or two big breaking news stories. The rest of the time, I’m updating the homepage, checking wires, filing news stories/features, copyediting other people’s work, posting items to Twitter and Facebook, sending out breaking news alerts, scanning social media and competitor’s sites for interesting content, searching other sections of our site for stories that deserve more play, reading through more than 1,000 emails, coordinating content with other editors, handling any corrections that come in overnight and waiting for news to occur somewhere in the world.
Last week, however, was utterly insane.
Every single evening, a major news story broke on my shift. On Sunday, I handled the North Korean nuclear test and the United Nations’ response. Monday night saw the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI. Between the manhunt for Christopher Dorner, the former LAPD police officer accused of committing a series of shooting attacks on police officers and their families, and the State of the Union speech, Tuesday was beyond busy. On Wednesday, Paralympian Oscar Pistorius was arrested and charged with killing his girlfriend. In between all of these stories, I also penned a brief about the president doing an “exploding fist bump” with Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), and an obituary for a man who appeared on several episodes of “Storage Wars.”
I would have covered the meteor that exploded above Siberia on Thursday, except I took the night off to spend Valentine’s Day with my awesome husband. Had I been on duty, however, my entire shift would have been dedicated to covering the 1,200+ people who were injured and the massive amount of damage caused by the space rock.
Light only knows what’ll happen this week.
Sometimes The Blog of Death server mocks me.
I’ll sign into the content management system, in this case WordPress, and attempt to delete the thousands (I kid you not) of spam messages sitting in the “to be approved” queue. For some reason, WordPress or my server Dream Host only allows me to delete 100 messages at a time and so the whole process takes for-freakin’-ever.
When I spend too much time on this task, I receive a server error that says my request is too large.
I hit the back button and try again.
“Your server request is too large.”
I clear my cache and try again.
“Your server request is too large.”
After seeing this message over and over, I start to take it personally. “No, server,” I think, “my request is not too large. Perhaps your capabilities are too small? Or maybe, just maybe, the spammers are too cruel. Did you ever think of that?”
The server does not reply.
I aim to inform, entertain and enlighten those who stay up in the wee hours of the night.
News. The night. And my muse, Isabelle. If I don’t tweet, she starts threatening me with death by sunlight. THE LIGHT. IT HURTS!
@ericspitznagel, @scalzi and @litsadremousis
@TheTweetOfGod, @FakeAPStylebook, @WriteRCastle, @OHnewsroom, @onebigphoto and @god_damn_batman
Talk about books. That way I’d know people were still reading texts greater than 140 characters.
Take the Shorty Interview at Shorty Awards, the awards honoring the best of social media.