Picking up names

May 16, 2008



I think the term name-dropper is negative and I’m hereby changing it to a positive act.

Of course this is self-serving because I want to drop a few names of the people I attended sessions with today at the Berkman@10 event at Harvard Law School.

These folks include David Dahl, Regional Editor at The Boston Globe and Dan Farber, Editor in Chief at CNET News.

From Mr. Dahl, I learned that Globe South is within his purview as editor. This pleases me because I live smack dab in the Globe South geographic area and have been writing for local papers on the South Shore for nearly 20 years. I’m hoping Mr. Dahl and I can speak again soon about features, articles, columns or fill-in stringing for the paper.

From Mr. Farber, I learned indirectly that my elevator pitch is fine-tuned when it comes to my new-media activities like podcasting, blogging and networking. I also learned that my freelance writing pitch is woefully inadequate and is something I should work on.

If given a second shot with Mr. Farber, I’d ask him to look at this column and this article for Apple Gazette. I wrote both of them this week and they show that I can deliver complete projects accurately and on time.

I would also point him to any of the columns that I’ve posted this week on my main blog – Bowl of Cheese – where I’ve been trying to be a lot more regular about my writing.

This has been important in the past, but even more important this week as I recently had John C. Dvorak (noted tech columnist for Market Watch and PC Week) put a link to my blog up on his blog. This drove an inordinate amount of traffic my way and I realized that I didn’t want people to just touch down on Bowl of Cheese and dash away.

So my content has been a lot more rich, thoughtful and regular this week.

To that end, I hope Mr. Farber takes the opportunity to contact me about possible projects with his organization while I continue my writing sabbatical and explore various avenues for my work.

Keep reading…and pick up names, don’t drop them.