By Robert Niles: If you've started a news website, or left a newsroom to work for an online start-up, don't let the journalism industry forget about you.
Keeping a high profile among your colleagues not only helps you personally, it can help drive attention and traffic to your site. But most importantly for our field, keeping track of how many journalists are working outside of traditional print and broadcast newsrooms helps journalism leaders to have a more accurate view of the state of our industry.
Last week, I got an invitation via email to participate in the American Society of News Editors's annual newsroom employment census. That wasn't something I'd expected, since I haven't worked in a "traditional" newsroom since leaving the Los Angeles Times in 2004.
But I'd never stopped working in journalism. Sure, I spent some time on the staff at USC's Annenberg School, but - along with my wife - we've been building an online publishing business over the past decade, too. So even though neither of us work for newspapers anymore (she spent several years on staff at the newspaper in Omaha, Neb.), we still consider ourselves full-time working journalists. (And that's not just a vanity description, either - together, we're making more income from our business than we ever made together working for newspapers.)
I completed the survey, noting that our company employed two journalists full-time, plus a summer intern. Then I emailed ASNE Executive Director Richard Karpel to ask why a small outfit like mine was getting a census invite.