JEEcamp and duckonomics

I went to Birmingham yesterday for the 2nd JEEcamp. Last year, it was very much an experiment to see what might happen if you stuck 50 journos in a room and let them unconference for a day. I came away feeling inspired and full of plans, but then my personal life upended itself and the online journalism venture I'd been mapping in my head for 2 years was no longer going to happen.

So, where are we 12 months on? Last year, I went alone, for 1 thing. This year I found myself on the early train with half a dozen other hacks - fuelled on pints of coffee, we took over an entire train carriage and annoyed all the commuters with our chitchat about modern hackery.

On arrival at JEEcamp, there was the usual opportunity to shake hands with people you co-follow on Twitter but only just met for the 1st time. Kyle McRae gave a really interesting account of his attempt to set up a picture agency trading in citizen journalists' photos and what happened when it all went horribly wrong.

There were breakout sessions and a couple of really good panel discussions about the future of journalism, particularly about paid-for content models (Rupert Murdoch had just annnounced his own thoughts on this), the problems with council-funded newspapers and the kinds of enterprises journalists might want to engage in.

A year ago, we were just seeing the start of the recessionary effects on our industry - job cuts, closed papers, freelance budgets affected etc - now the landscape looks very different and one thing is clear. Whatever that landscape will look like in another 12 months' time (and none of us can predict that), hacks are going to have be enterprising and create their own opportuinities (or do what I do and run a portfolio career). A colleague of mine who's been in the trade even longer than I have has a theory about the current state of play for the traditional business model for newspapers: "it's all as fucked as a fucked duck from Planet Fuck". Er, quite. Which is why events like JEEcamp are so important.

Andy Dickinson, who teaches journalism at UCLAN, was bang on the nail when he said we can't exist in isolation. For all we network on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere, there's no substitute for getting together face to face . So here's to next year's JEEcamp!

The train journey home went quicker, fuelled as it was with wine and sushi (and we'd already sunk several pints in the pub between JEEcamp and New Street station). On arrival at Piccadilly, it was a toss-up between going home or heading to the pub. I chose the latter, schlepping laptop bags across town while trying not to fall off my heels, to catch up with a friend. Several gallons of wine later, I fell into a cab, then my bed and decided nothing made sense anymore...

JEE whiz...

Your humble wordsmith has had a busy day.

Up at 5am, only to discover - quelle horreur! - that my monitor had popped its clogs overnight and I was minus internet access as a result. Not that I had time to surf, you understand, as I had a train to catch at a time most people are still sleeping through.

No matter, I was in Brum on time for JEEcamp. How to describe? A good opportunity to network, meet hacks I've previously only known online and, importantly, learn the latest about online journalism.

I've been toying with starting up a news site for quite some time and today's JEEcamp unconference was a useful opportunity to pick up dos and don'ts, tips and advice galore. I've come away feeling more confident, enthused and enlightened.

And for proof that I was there:

Blogger's block

You've heard of writer's block - now meet blogger's block.

The only cure for the former is to just get writing. There's nothing worse than sitting here staring at a blank sheet of paper or its modern equivalent, the empty white screen. Writing anything, even if it's complete bollocks,* is better than writing nothing and once you've got the bollocks out of your system there's a fair chance you'll find the writer's equivalent of your sea legs again.

Blogger's block is similar but, at least in my case, with a bit of added complexity thrown in. I've been working flat out all week, mostly writing for other people, which means when it came to writing for me, there wasn't much left. Inspiration, like Elvis Presley, had left the building. I've been incredibly busy on a major ghostwriting job this week, which has pretty much drained me. Add in juggling several new job offers, which involved lengthy telephone discussions and/or poring over freelance contracts plus vast quantities of email - not only did all that leave me too knackered to write but on the rare occasions that fleeting inspiration struck, when I had free time I'd discover I'd forgotten precisely what it was what that I'd decided, several hours earlier, to blog about.

Even yesterday's blog was a struggle and that after borrowing Dougalfish's idea! I'm sure you don't want to know it took me the best part of 90 minutes and two pints of tea to reconstruct that day.

Here I sit on a Friday evening, too exhausted to watch Wednesday's recording of Torchwood, sipping my third glass of Merlot. I didn't feel like blogging at all, but once in a week is a poor show. Hence my heroic effort tonight to explain why blogging can just be too damn difficult at times.

I'm looking forward to a lighter workload next week, including the opportunity to hang out at an unconference for online journalism. Who knows, it might even give me something to blog about!

* pardon my French