Out with the Old, in with the New

[Due to unforeseen circumstances, the following blog post has been published in hindsight and was originally written for publication on Friday 18th October 2013]

Hello, all!

I hope your placements are going smoothly. I see some of you have already finished -- congratulations! I can just about see the end of my placement over the horizon.

In today's day and age, social media has taken the world by storm. Blogs like Marcia's have been cropping up left, right and centre, and are vital for many industries as means to get information out that traditional news platforms might not cover. Over the last few shifts with Marcia, we've been doing a lot of brainstorming and thinking about where we want her blog Style Voyeur to go. The blog industry is a tricky one, and while blogging is fun for the most part, it is also incredibly time consuming, and time is an important resource if you're earning your income elsewhere. When I first saw Marcia at the Women In Media panel discussion earlier this year (as mentioned in my first post), she brought up some of the challenges she faces in regards to blogging for Style Voyeur:

• Sleepless nights -- this was her biggest frustration with blogging, and it is just part of the bigger picture: the need for newsworthiness. Certain events need to be blogged about the day they happen, otherwise others beat you to it and you lose newsworthiness. Blogs are often competing with each other for the best coverage, and while certain events or issues naturally garner lots of coverage, blogs will have better leverage if they are the first to get their stories out. As such, and especially during busy periods in the industry, bloggers will find themselves losing sleep over how much needs to be covered, photographed, written, interviewed, researched, and finally published. While this is done all the time in newsrooms around the world, we often forget that blogs are...
• One man bands: Marcia highlighted this as a blessing in theory, but a nightmare in reality. She, and many other blogs owned by just one person, are constantly competing with large media corporations, who can have multiple people working on a story and all the resources and talents available to them. While it is great to have all the power in making executive decisions, hiring extra hands is difficult because:
• Marcia's voice (style of coverage), expertise and taste in visuals is difficult to teach
• Her blog is not her main source of income (in fact, it's not even a source of income), and therefore it will not sustain employing additional team members
• Blogging is much more time consuming than it looks, particularly when they contain multimedia and quotes from interviewees. It can and sometimes is as credible and thorough as the news stories you may find in traditional media platforms. This ties into the two issues stated above.
• It is not commercially viable: Marcia earns no money off Style Voyeur, and given the time, effort and resources that go into maintaining the blog, it is soon coming clear that the outcome of having a successful, competitive blog that supports her career as a stylist and vice versa is difficult to sustain. 

After lots of brainstorming and discussion, we came to the conclusion that Marcia's biggest obstacle with Style Voyeur was the fact that it was not commercially feasible. If it were, many of the struggles she's facing maintaining it would not exist. Oh, the things one can do with money! We decided it was time for her to reinvent the wheel, so we then came up with a long-term strategy to turn Style Voyeur into a commercially viable business, which I'll be sure to delve into in my report.

After all the research I've been doing into the landscape of blogging, it got me thinking about how much the internet has changed the environment brands and businesses operate in. Everything in this day and age is evolving too fast to keep track of, and in the case of blogging, there will come a time where it isn't enough to just keep up -- bloggers have to try even harder to stay ahead of the game so they don't get left behind. This concept can be adopted into many industries I imagine, especially ones as innovative as media or the arts. As digital natives and current graduates, there hasn't been a crazier, more ever-evolving time to be out in the workforce than right now.

I hope you're all enjoying your placements so far,

Nicole