#splatf

It is, for the most part, a challenging time to be a “magazine company”. Circulation at newsstands isdown 10% this year, for instance. Time Inc.’s operating income decreased 43% year-over-year during the June quarter, on 9% lower sales.

by Emmanuel Quartey

There're a million articles out there about how to be a better blogger, but technology writer Dan Frommer's ten simple guidelines so perfectly describe what we're trying to do here at Wires Crossed that I had to share.

Three of my favourites:

2. Write the site that you want to read. That covers story selection, length, frequency, style, vocabulary, attitude, humor, level of sensationalism, and more. Don’t publish anything you’re not proud of. Be yourself.

Yes! All of us here at WC come from many different backgrounds and we each see the topic of mobile technology through a slightly different lens. We knew early on that we wanted this blog to be deeply contemplative, and so reviews of actual devices and applications will be mixed in with quiet ruminations about smallness and how we understand sacred space today.

9. Don’t be the 10th person to write the same thing. Say something that everyone else will wish they’d thought of. It takes longer, and it’s harder, but it’s worth it. When someone beats you to it, share their work if you love it — then they’ll want to share yours.

Again, there're millions of other places on the web where you can go read about technology. We want WC to be a place for something a little different - a "tech blog" whose posts are coloured by our different experiences as a college radio DJ, a member of the football team, writers for the Yale Daily News and even a performer for a collegiate cappella group.

10. Try new things, all the time. Especially those that are a little outside your comfort zone. This is the Internet — don’t act like you’re writing for Time Magazine in the 80s. Stories can be pictures, charts, lengthy essays, numbered lists, or 140 characters. Measure how your experiments do, and take the results into account for the future.

When we began the project, we thought a lot about how we were going to realize it. Would this be a documentary, an infographic, a storify, a podcast? Eventually, we decided that a blog was ideal because it gave us a central location to house different kinds of content, but we're eager to begin attempting different strategies of story-telling. Check back often to see how we're doing!

Read the whole list here. (via SplatF)

Want to get in touch with Wires Crossed? Shoot us a message @wires_crossed or [email protected]!

I already follow a lot of these rules myself. I have about 20 drafts saved that I've never gotten around to posting, often because of not liking the finished product or not having all the proper referrals. This blog has been mostly filler posts all its life, and I may just end it soon.

And after typing all that I see two posts on my feed that I feel I may reblog...

As Dan Frommer points out, this is bullshit. But then again, Google News itself is mostly bullshit.