On March 24th, William A. Jacobson was invited to my Independent Media Journalism class at Ithaca College. Just to briefly summarize the class, it is devoted to exploring independent media outlets that are not tied to conglomerate companies. Independent Media outlets have the liberty to explore their own voice without fear of being punished by their employers or ridiculed by the public. An independent journalist knows that his/her opinion may not be respected by everybody-- but they still choose to publish it, encouraging debates and conversation.

Most recently we’ve been discussing bloggers, independent journalists who focus on a niche that they feel passionate about. I’ve always wanted to be a fashion blogger. In middle school I created a lookbook (http://lookbook.nu/Gabbyj) where I posted outfits. I didn’t do it frequently enough and overtime I lost interest. I’ve been wanting to get back into the habit of it, but it’s taken me awhile. It’s not difficult, I just have to take photos of what I’m wearing in some kind of creative way, but something keeps holding me back. I sometimes fear that I’ll create an unsuccessful blog. As a perfectionist, I have a plan for everything. But a blog is something that can’t be so thoroughly planned. It’s a changing medium, changing with the writer and with the world.

Jacobson gave me confidence that anybody could create a successful blog with the right mindset. He started his conservative political blog: Legal Insurrection in 2008. (http://legalinsurrection.com/.) The blog started with a conversation. He was explaining his reasons for voting for John McCain and Sarah Palin in the 2008 presidential election. The person he was speaking to was voting for Obama, but said that Jacobson’s argument was very persuasive. He gave Jacobson the idea to start a blog. Jacobson took this advice and started a blog on google, posting about 1-3 posts a day. For the first two years of the blogs existence, Jacobson was the only writer.

As time went on and he realized how much work it was to maintain a blog, he collaborated with one of his students at Cornell and she began posting onto the blog about once a week. Most posts revolved around events because these seemed to generate the most user traffic . Legal insurrection moved away from google. Jacobson revealed an email from google saying that his blog was reported as spam. They gave him a time limit to respond to the email otherwise the blog would be removed. Jacobson decided to move away from google, scared about how much power and control it had. He moved on, collaborating with a small company where he has to pay a couple hundred dollars a month. This new site features advertisements and a higher level of organization. While the blog does get most of its revenue from advertisements, it also encourages donations from readers.

Jacobson’s visit to my class taught me the importance of timeliness. A blogger, as well as any journalist, needs to constantly update the public. Jacobson said that if he were to take breaks from blogging, his site would experience a major decrease in views. People don’t want to visit sites when the information hasn’t been updated. He also said that in order to get more views, it’s a good idea for bloggers to send their links to other sites. The sites might refer back to the blog, increasing the blog’s overall audience.

Overall I learned that as a blogger, you have to be confident that there is a group out there that will respect what you have to say. As long as you are true to what you believe and you represent yourself accurately and adopt a crucial journalistic mindset and skill set, everything else will figure itself out.