Indieweb for journalists

There are times when working as a journalist overlaps with the Indieweb movement.

The first and most obvious is having a syndicated work portfolio. If you like, a single source, feed or river of everything written or posted elsewhere.

This means linking back to stories published on mainstream media sites. I want to do this even when those sites don’t reciprocate my links.

At the moment I sometimes write a linking blog post on my site.

Linkrot doesn't help

One of the problems with this is the way big newspaper sites change URLs and even drop old content. Keeping links up to date is hard work.

My second idea is to somehow consolidate the comments that fill different buckets at places like Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. There are also some on Disqus.

There have been times when there are two or more conversations covering much the same aspects of a story. It would be better if the interested commenters could see what others have to say and interact.

Indieweb central repository

Then there’s my unrealised idea of moving to more of a stream-of-concious style of reporting. This is not so much Jack Kerouac style, but more like the daily live blogs you see on sites like The Guardian. I like the idea of writing a post then update it as the story evolves. This would be easier to manage with a central repository.

Last and not least, there’s my need as a journalist to own my work outside of the big silos.

I’m not a snob about FaceBook or Google, but I am aware their shareholders get the reward for my effort when my work appears there. It won’t happen overnight, but the Indieweb may hold the key to redressing the balance in the future.

There’s a lot to be said from taking back control over how we work with technology.