Sunday, December 31, 2006

The post-intrepreneurship Medium Run

Mike rediscovers the first law of blogging: never promise anything. If you say you've got three posts in the works, you won't write a thing for months. If you say you're going to type up your final thoughts on a seminar you went to, the file will sit permanently unfinished on your laptop's desktop. And if you say you're going to post something tomorrow, you'll have an existential crisis, quit your job and go to work as a direct-to-print reporter for a paper that doesn't even post its content until noon.

It wasn't actually much of a crisis, but a couple weeks ago I did leave the Daily News of Longview for the Columbian of Vancouver, a family-owned paper down the road that does some things online very well and others pretty clumsily. But it won't be my job to worry about that.

I don't expect to stop thinking or writing about the Web, but I'm abandoning the pretense of regular updates here.

Leaving the front lines always comes with a sense of loss and guilt, I guess. My previously mentioned friend David linked to a Guy Kawaski post that hit home:

From the outside looking in, entrepreneurs think intrapreneurs have it made: ample capital, infrastructure (desks, chairs, Internet access, secretaries, lines of credit, etc), salespeople, support people, and an umbrella brand.

Guess again. Intrapreneurs don’t have it better—at best, they simply have it different.

I can do without the chair, but I'll miss the capital. Increasingly, though, my hopes for the future of online news lie away from capital. In the meantime, I just want to learn how to write.

See you around.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

So, are you still writing here?

Michael said...

Yup, just less regularly.

 

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