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Digital media is easily the fastest-growing part of the industry, but how do you break in? Ed’s first ever Dot-Com Panel, which took place on March 11th, answered 40 Edsters’ biggest questions.
Panelists included Christie Griffin, Senior Web Editor for Cosmopolitan.com, Noelle Hancock, Senior Writer for PageSix.com, Susan Kaplow, Executive Web Editor for Condé Nast, Streeter Seidell, Front Page Editor for CollegeHumor.com, and Rachel Sklar, Media & Special Projects Editor for The Huffington Post.
Each panelist came to digital media differently: Griffin was initially just interested in magazines and took a freelance Web job at CosmoGIRL! to get her foot in the door. Hancock’s online career snowballed after filling in for a week at Gawker.com. Kaplow jumped in during the first Web boom by helping create Alloy Media and Marketing. Seidell sent a drunken e-mail one night and was asked the next day to write a column, and Sklar started by blogging for Mediabistro.com’s “Fishbowl NY.”
The major difference between long -lead magazines and Web sites, say the panelists, is that Web sites are 24 hour per day operations, so they’re driven by the news cycle. While it’s true that some bloggers don’t roll into the office until noon, if ever, they’re not exactly sleeping during that time. “I wake up and grab my laptop,” says Sklar. “If you’re going to be on top of the news from the beginning of the day, it’s useless to waste precious minutes showering, picking out clothes, and traveling to the office.” Even though the exclusive is pretty much dead –“You put something up and two minutes later, it’s everywhere,” says Hancock– there’s still pressure to post breaking news, get it right, and play around with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to get your site picked up by search engines like Google. “You can have a really great site, but if no one’s linking to it or it’s not showing up in Google, it kind of doesn’t exist,” says Griffin.
When asked which blogs these savvy Web editors read on a daily basis, most name the usual suspects: Gawker, Jezebel, and Perez Hilton. Spoken like a true gossip hound, Hancock rattles off a list of nearly 15 blogs that she’s constantly hitting refresh on. But our panelists are divided on whether it’s better to read newspapers in print or online. “I just go to Drudge Report,” says Griffin. “If that leads me to a story in the New York Times, great. But I never go to NYtimes.com or pick up the newspaper.” Streeter agrees: “The New York Times homepage throws up news all over you. And you’re just like, ‘I’m leaving. I’m going to Drudge where the stories are three words each.’”
But all agree that the best way to break into the field is to offer to be a body; Web editors always need people to dig through content and fix mistakes, says Griffin. Jump on any opportunity that arises, says Hancock, who started covering celebrity events after attending the premiere of Sweet Home Alabama while interning. Kaplow recommends going with your gut: Back in 1997, while working at Seventeen, she kept interviewing entrepreneurs. Inspired to start her own business, she joined forces with two “business rock-stars” and created the successful company, Alloy Media, which targets teenagers.
More breaking-in advice: If you want to write for a certain Web site, study it to find out what’s missing and offer to fill that void. Cosmopolitan.com has a new section of 30-day blogs, and Griffin’s always looking for fresh ideas. The Huffington Post is expanding and looking for new columnists, so if you have a great idea, send it over to Sklar and “you’ll have a post within a day,” she says. If you’re pitching a comedy site, it’s tempting to match the tone of the site, but sometimes, a professionally-worded e-mail is preferred. “I get pitches saying, ‘Sup man, what’s going on? Yo bro, you gotta check out this article I wrote,’ and I’m like, no. Not happening,” says Seidell.
While it’s not essential anymore to learn HTML—with novice-friendly blogging software, “HTML is like the dinosaur,” says Seidell—our panelists recommend learning programs like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. The next wave of dot-com is video; “The type of people that I’m hiring need to have video experience,” says Kaplow. She suggests learning how to use a video editing program, like Final Cut.
Want to know more about the dot-com world? Check out our complete transcript of the event! http://www.ed2010.com/2008/03/ed-s-dot-com-panel-transcript
—Kristen O’Gorman
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