Blogging Your Way Out of the Hackopalypse?

In a meeting earlier, I made a throw-away remark about the publishing news being so bad between now and next spring that all our journalists will be scared stiff. I was joking. But judging by the news coming in (hat tip to Heidi from Computer Weekly for these), magazine after magazine is going away.

In the context of this, the offer Six Apart (which is going through its own rough patch) made to out-on-their-ear journos looks like a smarter move than people gave them credit for. If you’re sitting on a redundancy payment, in a market where no-one’s hiring, a free blog with a little bit of income might just be the right way to reskill..

What I hadn’t
fully expected was how gripping the stories from individual journalists
have been. The mood of the emails we’ve gotten has ranged from hopeful
to heartbreaking, from cynical to sincere. Overall, there’s an optimism
which indicates that having a starting point to do something proactive
and positive will be a great first step for many journalists to take
control of their careers in an industry that is going through enormous
upheaval.

Sometimes, the most horrible change can be a step in the right direction.