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The Journalism Iconoclast | The blog of online journalist and Web developer Patrick Thornton

The blog of online journalist and Web developer Patrick Thornton. This blog seeks to combine journalism and Web development to forge a new frontier.

So, you have a blog. Now what? Vol. 1Yesterday

This is the start of a new series on the JI where I discuss tips on how to blog. These will usually be short, down-and-dirty tips. 

If you’ve just started a blog, you’re probably wondering, “how do I get people to read my blog?”

Sure, you can tell your friends and colleagues about it. You can e-mail prominent bloggers and ask them to mention your new blog or to add you to their blogroll. You can post about your new blog on Twitter and Facebook.

All fine, but if you really want your blog to get noticed (especially if it’s an independent blog), you need to join the community. If you’re blogging about journalism, start mixing it up on other journalism blogs. 

When I first started blogging, I went out and found the top journalism bloggers, read their blogs and started interacting with them. Every time I left a comment, I made sure to leave my real name and my blog address. Most blog commenting systems ask for a user to leave their name, e-mail address and URL, if applicable. 

So, when I leave a comment on Mindy McAdam’s fabulous Teaching Online Journalism blog my name shows up and my name is a link back to my blog. People who find my comments thoughtful or who want to learn more about me will click on my name. This started sending my blog traffic and still does.

This also started getting my name and my blog’s name out there. How are people supposed to find my blog otherw

Today’s Thought: Complacency is not an optionNovember 18

Complacency is a bridge to nowhere.

I cannot tell you or your news organization exactly what to do. There is no magic bullet that will save floundering news organizations. But I can tell you that the status quo will end in failure.

Innovation is ultimately what will save journalism. Innovation requires experimentation. Experimentation requires a willingness to fail.

But unlike the failure that the status quo will bring on, experimentation is a momentary feat of failure. It’s losing a battle, not the war.  Doing nothing will cause us to lose the war.

Rather, each time we experiment and we fail, we must pick ourselves back up and try again. We must learn. And we must never gave up.

The path to salvation is littered with many pit falls. It’s a hard, winding road that will only reward the most dogged of journalists and innovators. But it is our only choice.

So, I ask you, what are you doing to innovate? How will you navigate that path to salvation?

Podcast: David Cohn discusses Spot.Us and community fundingNovember 17

David Cohn launched his new community-funded journalism project, Spot.Us, last week to much fan fare.

I don’t know whether or not it can save journalism or if it will fail. My guess is on somewhere in the middle. It will probably be a viable way to fund certain kinds of journalism in certain communities.

In many ways I find the future of journalism to be similar to the future of energy security in the U.S. There isn’t a magic energy bullet for the U.S. Instead, it will be a combination of new energy technologies to wean the U.S. off of foreign energy and hydrocarbons.

Funding journalism will be the same way. We’ll need a variety of ways to fund journalism moving forward. The monopolies of newspapers are done.

I applaud Cohn for tackling the real issue facing journalism — how to fund it. Cohn’s business model might not be the sexiest. No, he won’t become rich by doing non-profit work that is predicated on the altruism of individuals.

But I think it can work. NPR and PBS both rely on people’s contributions. But perhaps the most logical comparison is Kiva.org. Cohn has learned a lot of lessons from that successful micro-lending site.

Cohn and I talk about how he can harness some of the concepts of Kiva to keep his startup running for years to come.

Cohn and I discuss several topics:

• Why Spot.Us? W

The real challenge that journalism needsNovember 14

Forget the Knight News Challenge.

It’s not what journalism really needs. What journalism needs is a challenge to create local news startups with new business models — to make products that people care about again and that are sustainable without subsidies.

Now, that’s a challenge. And instead of this being grant funded, it should be venture capital backed. And the VCs would only fund ideas and people (this is what VCs really fund) that they think have a chance of making money.

The Knight News Challenge is a great idea, and I love it. Heck, I even applied this year. But it’s focus is more on altruism and developing news tools to help journalism and society. That’s a laudable goal, and it will help make this world a better place.

But the Knight News Challenge doesn’t address a mission critical part of journalism — making money. Journalism has always been a business. It always will be.

The Knight News Challenge doesn’t care if the projects it funds make money or are even successful. That’s not the goal of the challenge. That’s why we need a challenge based on making new, sustainable businesses that people care about.

Together, the Knight News Challenge and this new VC-backed challenge could really change the face of journalism for years to come.

We were never in the newspaper businessNovember 13

We were always in the news business.

That’s what our readers and users care about. It’s the news. If people cared about the paper more than the news, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and other beacons of American journalism would have never risen to the world-wide prominence they enjoy today.

But they did. Why? Because they covered news better than everyone else. Never forget that.

Check out Michael Rosenblum’s rant. Send it around to every journalism you know. They need to understand this.

If we lose print — specifically daily newspapers — it won’t be the end of the world. What would be shocking to lose would be the journalism itself. That’s what matters.