It’s past 3:30am here in Toronto, and I have just finished setting up the bare-bones of this new blog. Long after registering a domain name (www.karenho.ca), I have finally set up the basics of my CV and linked things up to my flickr and twitter accounts.
And so the question remains, why now? Upgrade, the 71st National Conference for the Canadian University Press in Saskatoon was over a month ago, and many internship application deadlines for the summer have already passed. And so while I could be using this reading week to start researching for a few final essays, I chose to parlay whatever basic HTML knowledge I had into this – my new blog.
The funny thing is I’ve actually been blogging for the last seven or eight years, give or take a few changes. I’ll admit, much of the last few months saw a large decline in updates to my livejournal simply after I reverted back to paper-and-pen entries in trusty black Moleskine notebooks.
Truthfully, I had grown tired of wondering who were my readers were, writing for the sake of eliciting comments and never really understanding the point of why I was writing online in the first place.
Cut to a short time later, and I’m now a few short months away from graduating journalism school. I’ve realized not having an online presence outside of twitter and flickr is a lot like a newspaper not updating their website. Without taking that little extra effort, both never fully utilize their potential or reach out to the maximum number of people available.
So it was time for a change.
And ever since I’ve been connecting to people on CollegeJourn or Seesmic for advice (mostly thanks to the work of Suzanne Yada and NYU’s Jay Rosen) it made sense to finally make the jump and start my own j-school blog. A place to reflect on events like Nash71, or current news, or how other student journalists across North America were dealing with the recession and changes in traditional print.
It also didn’t hurt that at this time I was aching to reflect on the experience of trying to crowd-source advice on the possibility of being sued by my own student union.
And so here it is and here I am. I hope this blog is as informative, interesting and thought-provoking to readers as it will be for me. I certainly look forward to seeing what comes next.
Karen K. Ho 
I look forward to it as well. 🙂
“Truthfully, I had grown tired of wondering who were my readers were, writing for the sake of eliciting comments and never really understanding the point of why I was writing online in the first place.”
I think every blogger without the triple-digit comments high from every post has contemplated the same thing. I know I have at least two posts in my own blog if you dig far enough whining “why am I doing this?”, “does anyone even care to read this?”, etc.
Every once in a while I give up too, but I always seem to come back to it. And I know it has been helpful more than once for my career, so you should keep at it too!
Lookinf forward to your insights! The blog looks sweet. Is that Florence? It looks like a less-massive Ponte Vecchio.
Why NOT now? Hmm?
Anyway. I’m going to add you to my blog roll, madame. So you’d better not make me look like a chump! 😉