Remember a few weeks ago when I did that interview about Crowdsourcing with Karim Lakhani? Maybe you don’t. It was up on Assignment Zero as part of this crowdsourced experiment in writing in-depth journalism. Well, Wired.com is running the story on the Assignment and what Crowdsourcing means and all that. This includes links to all the interviews that were done which were also the bases for other stories and stuff. All in all, interesting stuff.
And today they’re running my interview with a link to it from the front page. I now have a real Wired.com byline. I feel much better about this one than the “additional reporting” credit last time I was in Wired (which was also on Assignment Zero back when I was just stepping up). This time it’s based on actual work I did that required me to be a journalist, and my contribution wasn’t reduced to a chunk of a single sentence.
Also, my mom’s been getting many positive reactions to my Young Prophets thing in the Canadian Mennonite. And not just my grandma either. Actually I don’t know how my grandma liked it; I just know she read it. But other people are saying things about how nice it is to read something that isn’t so overtly churchy in there. And I keep on wanting them to write emails in to the magazine to tell them that I’m what the people want, damnit! (No, I haven’t heard back yet about being hired or not, but he said it’d take some time and that he’d let me know either way. It’s a far cry from walking out of an interview and getting a call that afternoon saying “Way to not be an idiot. Here’s a job.”) I also haven’t received my cheque for that piece yet, but I don’t want to bug them until I find out if I’m an employee or not.
Anyway. I’ve had a pretty good few days of confidence building on this whole writing thing. It’s reassuring that just because nobody will hire me doesn’t mean I’m completely wasting my every moment behind the keyboard. And if they decide not to want me as a professional Mennonite journo, that’s fine. There are far worse things than being my level of poor.
