Media dis&dat has celebrated its one year anniversary this week and I thought I would reflect a bit on what I have learned from doing the blog. First, it should be mentioned that mine is not a typical blog, because only rarely do I write my opinion about disability and media issues. I view the blog as more of a database of stories about disability issues that are in the news media around the world each day. I hope that this database of stories will be useful to me and others as the collection grows. (I posted more than 2,000 entries in 2008.)So what have I learned?
- Blogging takes lots of time! Even though I write very little, I have to read through 30+ Google Alerts every day and the multiple stories attached to each Alert. So that means dozens and dozens of stories skimmed every day. And each of the stories selected for the blog has to be cut and pasted, formatted and the picture added, if there is one. I have an actual full-time job, so many times I have to speed through the postings to Media dis&dat.
I post full stories because I truly want the blog to be a database and I can’t guarantee that I will be able to access a full story months later unless I put it on the blog. Some newspapers, like The NY Times, now have much of their full content online, but because I don’t know if that is the case with other news stories I post, I want to make sure that I have a copy of the full story. - Google Alerts is imperfect. I know I am missing certain stories in certain newspapers because something about the way some newspaper construct their Web sites seem to make them immune to Google Alerts. So in addition to the flaws in my personal selection process, I am missing stories because of Google Alerts.
- But even with those flaws, it is really exciting to see all the stories about disability topics from around the world. There’s much more coverage of disability topics and people with disabilities in the USA and internationally than I expected. It’s interesting to watch the media feed off each other; as one story makes it into a major media source, then smaller media outlets either run that story or do their own local version of it.
- What I will be watching for in 2009 is repetition of disability stories and their topics. Not all the stories I post are ground-breaking. Many are just features about a local person with a disability doing something that may or may not be newsworthy, known as a “supercrip” story. The reason I post these is not because I think they are particularly good but because I want them in the “database.”
- Just posting the stories gives me wonderful information about what’s going on with disability issues around the globe, from a feature on a disabled man’s fish farm in Malaysia to a state in India trying to improve its disability rights laws to British TV’s broadcast of a disabled man’s assisted suicide. Most of these stories never made the U.S. news so I view the blog as a place where all this disability-related news can be together in one place.
- Because the blog is about all media, I have taken a broad view of “media” and post things from press releases before they are news, and I post lots of entries about the entertainment media, because as I wrote in my visibility essay, entertainment TV reaches many more people than news stories do. I don’t post much from other blogs, however. With so many other blogs about disability topics available, I feel that they are readily available to anyone who also reads Media dis&dat.
Finally, I want to thank all of you who have stopped by to read something on Media dis&dat over the past year. Some of you I know, some of you have emailed with great tips, and I know many of you read it but are not in contact with me. That’s fine, but if anyone ever has a tip or thinks I have missed posting an important story, please let me know. I view Media dis&dat as a resource for all my readers, so I hope it helps everyone in their endeavors toward creating an inclusive society all people.
