My advice would be to blog often, go out and do stories on whatever – to some extent you can do perfectly decent work by behaving like a drifting ship along a coastline which happens upon things of interest by mere virtue of its traversal over a given area. The biggest problem in journalism – which can work to your advantage – is that most journalists won’t even stray out of port to do any proper investigations.

I said on Sarah Hartley’s blog the other night that hyperlocal is just what the local press did back in the day. I stand by that sentiment; it isn’t new, it’s just a buzz-term that crops up and masquarades as such. A bad habit is getting into writing without thinking about what you’re doing; fatigue and fostering laziness does this to most people in the profession over time. They end up writing vacuous, stupid or otherwise subpar prose and even making fools of themselves – seen it happen a lot over the years.

My own site focuses on what I’ve liked doing alongside stock and trade in-depth stuff…that would be satire. http://www.dirtygarnet.com is a new website with a small staff that focuses on satire together with quirky pieces.

Oh yeah, and if you can…try angering at least one of those bullying, lazy editors that reign over a good proportion of local rags – stating the truth is often enough to get these wasters in a huff. It’s satisfying to not be under their control and bring them down a peg particularly in public; out of their dictatorial lock-in that is the office over which they rule. Don’t be abusive and just state facts, keep calm etc…come up smelling of roses!

-Pete