The Making of the Next Blog Post

The post directly above this one, about the death of traditional journalism, has a very interesting provenance. I thought I’d share it with you and provide a look into the mindset of one blogger choosing one story–because as someone who was raised on newspapers, I’ve obviously come far in my information patterns.

PR guru Peter Shankman started a service less than a year ago called Help A Reporter Out; it matches journalists seeking sources with over 40,000 readers seeking news coverage. The venture is free, and advertising-supported. It started as a Facebook group, an I’m proud to say that I was the sixth member.

Today, Peter ran this ad:

This HARO: Cinterim. Cinterim is technology marketing like you
never seen it before, time-sliced marketing: only what you need,
when you need it. They’ve termed it Marketing as a Service: From
Chief Marketing Officers and market-driven business strategy to
complete outsourced marketing services. But they don’t have any
clients or accounts, rather, they serve as a partner to every
company they work with, whether helping a start-up to focus or
turning a later stage or public company’s strategies and execution.
Cinterim is fully invested in each partner’s short- and long-term
success. Make Cinterim your secret weapon. Find them at
www.cinterim.com. And be sure to check out co-founders Lisa Arthur
and Michael Bloom’s hard hitting blog, www.fearofmarketing.com , a
prelude to their book-in-progress, Fear of Marketing, Why the
companies that connect people are disconnected.

Now, I’m not someone who clicks on ads a lot, but I do read Peter’s sponsorship notices, and have followed several of them. I went to the blog. And found this very intelligent and thoughtful article about GM’s troubles (I’ll forgive the sloppy proofreading–lord knows, I’ve certainly been guilty of that!). I even put in a comment, about market share not necessarily being what it’s cracked up to be.

And then I glanced at the blogroll, which only had four entries. I saw three blogs I knew and respected, and this intriguing-sounding one called Lost Remote. So I clicked over and found the story I blogged about.

In fact, I sent my assistant a note asking her to add both Fear of Marketing and Lost Remote to both my own blogroll and my personal blog-reading widget that notifies me of new posts.

Of course, the problem with this kind of journo-voyeuristic ADD, which I get a lot, is that my goal for the last hour was to lower my inbox from 997 to 950.I got it all the way to 996. Yeah, my inbox is so crowded because I’ll get a mailing from Huffington Post or Marketing Sherpa or dozens of others, and I start following a lot of the links, and then at some point I have to do paying work. Oh well, next time!

And if you haven’t read my post on the death of journalism, please scroll up. It’ll be right on top of this one.