

Are #Hashtags Stifling Your Creativity?
We all want our work to be seen. We want our stories to be clicked on, our videos to be shared, our posts to be “liked.” We all need some component of “marketing” to make sure our work is shared or experienced (if that is indeed your goal). But coming up with clickbaity headlines and unique hashtags is taking up almost as much time as creating your piece of work! Let’s talk about writers specifically for a moment. What if - and I know this seems to be scary –a story could be

Let’s Stop Pretending We Are All Friends
We need a new word for “Friends.” How many people on your social channels do you actually KNOW? I personally have more than 4,800 “friends” on Facebook, yet I probably I only know 10 percent of them. Are they my friends? Not really. But do we have a shared common interest or friend? Maybe. One definition of friend is “a person whom one knows and with whom one has a bond of mutual affection.” Do you have “mutual affection” for every one of your Twitter followers? While there i


Why the News Media Should Strive for the Pulitzer, not the Oscar!
Is there an actor shortage? It seems like there are an awful lot of real reporters who are making appearances in movies and TV shows. While it’s not new to see “real” reporters in the movies, in the age of fake news and “post truth” (the unfortunate choice for the “word of the year” from the folks over at Oxford Dictionaries), all of the sudden it feels icky to see our trusted sources of information shilling for the latest Batman movie (a la Charlie Rose). Sure, it’s fun to s