My technorati rank might be in freefall as my work life increasingly gets in the way of my blogging, but Graham Holliday still saw fit to include me in his feature about UK based media and journalism bloggers in this week’s print edition of the Press Gazette.
The list includes my friends Richard Sambrook, Kevin Anderson and Suw Charman, and the Telegraph’s Shane Richmond.
Also in there are some blogs I’m quite familiar with and whose authors I bounce a bit of comment banter back and forth with, including The Guardian’s Neil McIntosh and Andrew Grant-Adamson, the University of Westminster Journalism lecturer behind Wordblog.
Here are, by the way, some weird facts about the above:
Kevin Anderson and I met when he was working at the BBC. He got his first proper journalism job as staff at the Peoria Journal Star, my hometown paper. He quit the BBC to go work for Neil McIntosh at the Guardian. I met Neil’s blogging brother, Ewan, at Le Web 3 in Paris back in December and went to dinner with him and Graham, who wrote the article. Andrew lists the Press Gazette’s Martin Stabe in his blog roll as a past student at Westminster, a university I also spent some time at myself although not in journalism. And although I managed to blag a guest post out of Richard Sambrook sometime previously and we’d emailed, I think I first met him face to face at the We Media conference in May 2006, where I sat across the table from Graham on the first day and met him after we realised we were both blogging photos of each other blogging… See what I mean – it’s a pretty small world we blog in.
Whilst I’m less familiar with the other blogs and bloggers on the list, they’re certainly worth a visit but if I listed them all and provided a link from here you might not take the time visit the excellent blog of Martin Stabe, who would himself have been on the list if he didn’t happen to work for the Press Gazette (in which the feature appears). Martin’s got the full list and a bit more info on the feature…
Andrew was indeed my journalism tutor once, but not at Westminster Uni. His previous job was at City University, where I was a student a couple of years ago.
Martin has beaten me to pointing out your understandable mistake. Until a couple of years ago I taught at both Westminster and City where Martin was a student. Adrian Monck who is also on the PG blogroll is head of the journalism department at City so there is another connection. The lack of clarity in my own blogroll is my fault and will be changed over the weekend.
Andrew, regardless of which university you happen to be at, you certainly have a knack for providing us with some talented journalists who blog – in addition to Martin (http://www.martinstabe.com/blog/), I also follow Kristine Lowe (http://kristinelowe.blogs.com/).
One other sad connection – Shane Richmond and I are both Norwich City FC fans…
And you met Shane in Paris too.
And it turns out – sorry Seamus – that I met Seamus McCauley a few months ago and got an email from Andy Dickinson just last week. It’s not going to be long before someone accuses us of bribing, or collectively bullying, you into putting us on that list Graham! ;-)
Thanks, Robin. Both Martin Stabe and I were at City, though different years, where, at least in my time, Andrew taught Electronic(digital)Journalism. Back then, of course, I was on a one-way-track to doing good old-fashioned print journalism. A good friend, Adriana (Mediainfluencer in my blogroll), pushed The Cluetrain Manifesto into my hands, I did a stint of work experience for Richard Burton, at what was then The Electronic Telegraph, but it took years for all of these connections and experiences to bear fruit, and me start blogging (from 2001-2005). And I wonder sometimes what another big mentor of mine, the late John Coyle, would have thought of this brave new world of social media: he instilled in me a great fascination for Fleet Street, but he himself was not even capable of operating a computer.