Understudy

Hi there. This is a networked site intended to host blogs by people studying the intersections between journalism, new media, and digital culture. That means scholars who keep research blogs, journalists who are interested in and/or tinkering with new media, citizen-journalists, news-minded Wikipedians, and anyone else who’s fascinated by this topic.

There are a lot of people blogging about these topics already. The idea behind this site is to group their writings, and thereby put more people in conversation with one another. With any luck an interesting research group and/or community of practice will be forthcoming. If it’s sizable, that’s great, but my hope is that even a few bright people in conversation here will make this place worthwhile.

Of course, while that’s the hope, I recognize just how many online projects fail, and that people also like keeping their writings to their own blogs and domains. So, if you’re interested in this experiment, I encourage you to cross-post anything you like, between here and your own blog. Any content you author on this site is yours—you own it and can do what you wish with it. If you like, you’re also encouraged to mark your blog with a Creative Commons or GNU-GPL license to encourage others to share the content.

Lastly, I’ll be hosting this site on my existing webserver until there’s enough interest and continued activity to justify taking out a new site and domain name. To make things a little easier, I’ve marked this site with a subdomain. You can get here any time by going to http://understudy.wideaperture.net. I don’t know if that’s any easier than http://wideaperture.net/understudy/—but if your memory is as bad as mine, I suppose it slightly increases the probability that you’ll land here after wracking your brain for the URL.

In the left sidebar is an RSS-able feed of the latest posts and comments from across the site, and to the right is the roll of research blogs hosted here, with the most recently updated appearing first. Here, front-and-center, on the homepage is the real-estate given to site-development news (and, if people like the idea, for featuring popular posts).

For my own part, and on behalf of any future users, let me say that I look forward to seeing what you write!