09.16.09

Timing is everything.

In July, I completed an essay I had been invited to write for the Nieman Reports, chronicling my experiments in social media journalism between when I left my old newspaper last year and when I arrived here at the University of Missouri.

Yesterday, NR’s fall issue: Let’s Talk: Journalism and Social Media, was posted online.

My essay links to my last blog, which has been mostly on autopilot for a month; my photojournalism portfolio, which I have taken offline; and my Twitter feed, which exploded accidental spam to my 50,000 followers when an experiment with bots for ReTweets went bad. Really bad.

I blame this primarily on my new job, and living up to the diligence of our incredible faculty, but also on my inability to define exactly who I am, a problem that was addressed and apparently resolved in the essay.

Can I blog as a journalist when I have no time to report, or as a journalism professor after wearing that hat for only a month?

At the end of the day, my social media identity is muddled because my face-to-face identity is in transition, again.

Life is good, but I feel truly awkward about my situation because my blogs don’t presently live up to the hype.

Wish me luck.