Omaira Gill :
Last week I took part in a travel blogging convention based in Athens. Travel bloggers from all over the world descended on the city for a week to talk about honing their craft and to network.
Technically I was working and present at the conference on behalf of one of the companies I freelance for. But you can always snatch away a few moments to mix some pleasure with business, so I grabbed the chance to talk to fellow writers on the few rare opportunities I took a break.
There were people that write about travelling, travelling and eating, travelling with children, luxury travel, budget travel, popular travel and off the beaten track. There were people there from all over the world and others who, like me, had just got on the metro to get there that morning. Most of them were painfully, enviably young. I found myself wondering where they found the time, the money, and mostly where they found the courage.
At 24, I was still scraping together the courage to take a leap of faith and move to Greece. Here I came face to face with the best that Generation Y had to offer, well-travelled and extremely self-assured – the ‘As Featured In’ section on their sites is the stuff my dreams are made of. In between replenishing leaflets at my booth, I glanced up around me and admired what I saw. I wish I had had that sort of drive at the same age.
Bloggers and journalists have a strange kind of competition running between them. It’s a bit like termites and ants, motorists and cyclists. Both are a type of insect, and both are trying to get from A to B, but each type will insist that the other is a less fantastic version of the other.
Many journalists will look at a business card with the job description showing Blogger and snort – that’s not a real job. We went to university, or trained at newspapers. We honed our craft over years of work and stacks of rejection letters.
The truth is that the animosity that a lot of journalists feel about bloggers is because they feel threatened. Bloggers may not have undergone the kind of formal training that journalists do, and anyone with a keyboard and a WiFi connection can call themselves a writer nowadays. But the same rule applies to both crafts – if you can write well, you are qualified.
And as with both arenas, it’s not always the good writers that get ahead. Some of the most exceptional writing talent is buried in small newspapers and publishing houses, and I have noticed that writing quality has little to do with how popular your blog is. That has more to do with your own savviness, marketing skills and sprinklings of Internet Lucky Dust.
I experienced as much when one of my own blog posts accidentally went viral. I say accidentally, because beyond sharing it once on my own Facebook page, I did nothing by way of promotion. I went to bed feeling very pleased about the 19 views it got. By the end of the week, that one post had broken past 70,000 views.
The internet had come trampling through my life, and among the nearly 200 comments I got were the loud critics who insisted that I was a terrible writer and had nothing to deserve the attention I was suddenly getting. I disagree with the former, but I sort of agree with the latter.
In writing that post, I fell into a perfect storm of a grabbing headline, good timing and that lucky dust I mentioned. I am a journalist first and foremost, not a blogger, but I doubt that any article I wrote ever got read by over 70,000 people. This is the magic and the attraction of blogging.
But just as talented writing is not the making of the most famous blogs, I have been known to throw reputable newspapers across the room in disgust after seeing yet another celebrity columnist who has wormed their way into the sort of press I can only dream about because of their connections.
At one point, I found myself talking to a veteran journalist at the event and we waxed lyrical about our chosen careers. He had embraced this new frontier. I had resisted nearly every step – refusing to acknowledge I even had a blog by blogging anonymously for five years and insisting I would never use a smartphone, until I did. I only opened an Instagram account last week after being asked at a job interview why I didn’t have one. This is now apparently cause for suspicion.
Around me, beautiful young people live blogged their day. Maybe I’m not ready to preface my every move with a wave of a smartphone, but I’m getting there.
Last week I took part in a travel blogging convention based in Athens. Travel bloggers from all over the world descended on the city for a week to talk about honing their craft and to network.
Technically I was working and present at the conference on behalf of one of the companies I freelance for. But you can always snatch away a few moments to mix some pleasure with business, so I grabbed the chance to talk to fellow writers on the few rare opportunities I took a break.
There were people that write about travelling, travelling and eating, travelling with children, luxury travel, budget travel, popular travel and off the beaten track. There were people there from all over the world and others who, like me, had just got on the metro to get there that morning. Most of them were painfully, enviably young. I found myself wondering where they found the time, the money, and mostly where they found the courage.
At 24, I was still scraping together the courage to take a leap of faith and move to Greece. Here I came face to face with the best that Generation Y had to offer, well-travelled and extremely self-assured – the ‘As Featured In’ section on their sites is the stuff my dreams are made of. In between replenishing leaflets at my booth, I glanced up around me and admired what I saw. I wish I had had that sort of drive at the same age.
Bloggers and journalists have a strange kind of competition running between them. It’s a bit like termites and ants, motorists and cyclists. Both are a type of insect, and both are trying to get from A to B, but each type will insist that the other is a less fantastic version of the other.
Many journalists will look at a business card with the job description showing Blogger and snort – that’s not a real job. We went to university, or trained at newspapers. We honed our craft over years of work and stacks of rejection letters.
The truth is that the animosity that a lot of journalists feel about bloggers is because they feel threatened. Bloggers may not have undergone the kind of formal training that journalists do, and anyone with a keyboard and a WiFi connection can call themselves a writer nowadays. But the same rule applies to both crafts – if you can write well, you are qualified.
And as with both arenas, it’s not always the good writers that get ahead. Some of the most exceptional writing talent is buried in small newspapers and publishing houses, and I have noticed that writing quality has little to do with how popular your blog is. That has more to do with your own savviness, marketing skills and sprinklings of Internet Lucky Dust.
I experienced as much when one of my own blog posts accidentally went viral. I say accidentally, because beyond sharing it once on my own Facebook page, I did nothing by way of promotion. I went to bed feeling very pleased about the 19 views it got. By the end of the week, that one post had broken past 70,000 views.
The internet had come trampling through my life, and among the nearly 200 comments I got were the loud critics who insisted that I was a terrible writer and had nothing to deserve the attention I was suddenly getting. I disagree with the former, but I sort of agree with the latter.
In writing that post, I fell into a perfect storm of a grabbing headline, good timing and that lucky dust I mentioned. I am a journalist first and foremost, not a blogger, but I doubt that any article I wrote ever got read by over 70,000 people. This is the magic and the attraction of blogging.
But just as talented writing is not the making of the most famous blogs, I have been known to throw reputable newspapers across the room in disgust after seeing yet another celebrity columnist who has wormed their way into the sort of press I can only dream about because of their connections.
At one point, I found myself talking to a veteran journalist at the event and we waxed lyrical about our chosen careers. He had embraced this new frontier. I had resisted nearly every step – refusing to acknowledge I even had a blog by blogging anonymously for five years and insisting I would never use a smartphone, until I did. I only opened an Instagram account last week after being asked at a job interview why I didn’t have one. This is now apparently cause for suspicion.
Around me, beautiful young people live blogged their day. Maybe I’m not ready to preface my every move with a wave of a smartphone, but I’m getting there.
(Omaira Gill is a freelance journalist based in Athens)
