November 7, 2019: 9 Years of AmericanStudier: Other Online Gigs

[This week marks this blog’s 9^th anniversary! Nearly 2800 posts later, AmericanStudier has become my most extended & enduring life’s work, and so this week I wanted to share a handful of the reasons why I’ve kept it going for so long. Leading up a special weekend list of other scholarly blogs that we should all be reading—add your suggestions (including your own blog of course), please!]

Over the last 9 years I’ve had the chance to write for many different online spaces, whether scholarly, political, or mass media. But I’ve had three main, multi-year such online gigs, and each has both reflected and contributed to my blog writing:

1)      Talking Points Memo (TPM): In November 2014, Avi Green of the Scholars Strategy Network helped me land my first op ed with Josh Marshall’s political and social commentary site TPM. Written in response to President Obama’s immigration executive order, that op ed remains my most viral to date—it received over 110,000 views and became TPM’s 4^th most-viewed op ed of 2014. I had to write that 750-word op ed in just a couple hours, and I’m quite sure that my then four years of blogging experience were crucial to my ability to produce a strong short-form piece so quickly. But it, and the 15 months of bimonthly pieces I would go on to write for TPM, also changed my blogging and public scholarship in clear and crucial ways, helping me become both more responsive to our current moment in my topics and ideas and more aware of audience in my voice and form.

2)      Huffington Post: When my TPM editor left for another job and the site’s “Café” op ed section began to disappear, I found a second consistent online gig—as a blogger for the Huffington Post (the in the process of morphing into its current form as HuffPost). My HuffPost work wasn’t as consistent, not least because I didn’t work with an editor and so didn’t have the same expectations and schedule. That meant I could write pieces when the need arose, but also made the gig feel both less collaborative and less central to my evolving public scholarly career. But I wrote about 20 pieces for HuffPost over a year and a half period, and that work did force me to continue thinking about the questions of style and form, audience and response that I had begun developing during my TPM tenure. In particular, I would argue that I began finding ways to bring my own voice and experiences into the HuffPost columns more consistently, which both derived from and continued to influence my blogging voice as well.

3)      The Saturday Evening Post: In late 2017, I connected with Jennifer Bortel, then the new (or least new-ish) web editor for the Saturday Evening Post. That connection quickly led to my bimonthly Considering History column for the Post, now nearing its 2-year anniversary and by far my most enjoyable and meaningful online writing gig to date. There are lots of reasons why, including how much of a pleasure Jen is to work with; but if I had to sum it up, I would go back to three reasons for starting this blog about which I wrote in Monday’s post: adding to our collective memories in order to counter contemporary political myths and propaganda; finding a space to do public scholarly writing; and finding community and connections. The Post has helped me do all those things, and has in many ways become a true complement to AmericanStudier and second home for my online public scholarly work and identity. Here’s to what’s next (on which more tomorrow)!

Last anniversary reflection tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Other scholarly blogs you’d suggest for the weekend list?

November 6, 2019: 9 Years of AmericanStudier: Sharing Your Voices

[This week marks this blog’s 9^th anniversary! Nearly 2800 posts later, AmericanStudier has become my most extended & enduring life’s work, and so this week I wanted to share a handful of the reasons why I’ve kept it going for so long. Leading up a special weekend list of other scholarly blogs that we should all be reading—add your suggestions (including your own blog of course), please!]

On three stages in my evolving, increasingly central goal of making my individual blog also a communal, multi-vocal space.

1)      Guest Posts: I knew from the outset that I wanted to include voices other than my own in this space, and so I featured my first Guest Post (from a very special Guest Poster!) after just over two months, in early January 2011. Since then I’ve been delighted to feature more than 50 such posts (you can find them all by clicking on the Guest Posts label in this blog’s right-hand column), up through Ariella Baker-Archer’s Halloween-tastic Guest Post a couple weeks ago. They’ve all been radically different in style and structure from my relatively consistent form, which is a significant part of the point—that is, Guest Posts aren’t just about sharing other voices, content, topics, or analyses (although of course that’s all part of it); they also offer other scholars and writers a chance to use this form and this blog in whatever ways will (I hope) most benefit their own thinking and work. I’ve loved every chance to share a Guest Post (well, other than that one, but you know who you are…I kid, I kid), and can’t wait for the next 50!

2)      Crowd-sourced Posts: About a year after that first Guest Post, in early 2012, I knew that the blog would have to evolve substantially if I was going to be both able to continue (time-wise) and interested in doing so. One of the most significant changes was the move to weekly series, which allows me to write and schedule blocks of posts much more easily (quite simply the only way I’ve been able to keep writing a daily blog for all these years). And as an unexpected side effect to that shift, I realized that for topics which seemed to speak to many fellow AmericanStudiers, I could use the weekend post to elicit and share collective responses and ideas on that week’s subject. This June 16-17 follow-up to a series on material culture was the first such crowd-sourced post, of which I’ve now had the chance to feature more than 110. They are often some of my very favorite posts (ironically, the annual Non-Favorites post is a particular fav), as they draw out many more voices and perspectives, responses and suggestions, than would ever be possible from Guest Posts alone.

3)      Social media: Many of the contributions to those crowd-sourced posts have come from Facebook comment threads, but I’m thinking here especially about Twitter. When I started AmericanStudier I didn’t even have a Twitter account; I opened my account in early 2011 largely as a vehicle through which to share blog posts. I’m ashamed to admit that for the first couple years I mostly used Twitter to that end, to share my own work. But I’ve gradually become (I hope and believe) much better at being a member of the Twitter scholarly community, and while that especially means sharing and engaging with the work and voices of others, it has also fundamentally changed how I share my blog. Now I’m much more likely to create a mini-thread, both to highlight a few sides of that day’s and week’s topics and to encourage responses and conversation from my thousands of fellow scholarly Tweeters. Sometimes those end up being part of crowd-sourced posts (in weeks when I feature them), but they always affect and change and strengthen my own thoughts and the blog. One more way your voices have become increasingly central to this space!

Next anniversary reflection tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Other scholarly blogs you’d suggest for the weekend list? Or ideas for Guest Posts you’d like to contribute (email me if so!)?

November 5, 2019: 9 Years of AmericanStudier: Personal Benefits

[This week marks this blog’s 9^th anniversary! Nearly 2800 posts later, AmericanStudier has become my most extended & enduring life’s work, and so this week I wanted to share a handful of the reasons why I’ve kept it going for so long. Leading up a special weekend list of other scholarly blogs that we should all be reading—add your suggestions (including your own blog of course), please!]

On three of the many ways (along with those I highlighted in yesterday’s post, and those to which the rest of the week’s posts will connect) I’ve benefitted immeasurably from my work on AmericanStudier.

1)      Experimentation: As I mentioned yesterday, when I started the blog most if not all of my scholarly writing existed within the traditional peer-reviewed formats. Besides the frustratingly long time-lag between writing and publication, another limitation of those formats (which, to be clear, I still value and continue to work in alongside blogging and other forms) is that they require both the writing and the ideas to be entirely developed (indeed, as close to perfect as we flawed humans can produce) by the time of submission. Whereas in this space, I’ve found the opportunity and freedom to write about things I’ve just begun to consider, to explore topics and texts about which I’ve just begun learning, to share partial and preliminary and provisional ideas, to, in a word, experiment.

2)      Books: I genuinely had no idea that this would be the case when I began blogging (nor for at least a year or so thereafter), but it turns out that such experimentation isn’t just a complement to more traditional academic formats—it can also become a starting point for work in those formats. I can’t remember if the final work on my second book, which came out in the summer of 2011, was influenced at all by the blog, although it may well have been. But I know for sure that each of my last three books has started quite overtly with posts and ideas here (among other influences of course, but with this space as a consistent and crucial one). When I talk up the benefits of scholarly blogging, as I did earlier this fall at the annual Teaching at Teaching-Intensive Institutions conference, I make very clear that it’s not only not a distraction from our other scholarly writing and work—it’s also and especially a pipeline to that work!

3)      A Consistent Scholarly Identity: The title of my TTII talk was “Maintaining a Scholarly Identity on a 4/4 Load,” and that’s perhaps been the most beneficial blogging benefit of all. During semesters and academic years at a teaching-intensive institution, it’s nearly impossible to do any long-form scholarly writing; that’s what breaks and summers are for. But when we get to those times, it can feel like it takes a long time (far too long, indeed) to get back into a scholarly writing headspace. And a daily scholarly blog (or one on whatever schedule works for you, although I do recommend some sort of a schedule) fights that problem head-on, making our scholarly writing and work part of our life throughout the semesters and years. Even though I no longer write the blog each day (writing and scheduling in bunches), I get to see it, read it, share it each day, and that makes my scholarly writing and identity part of my daily life in an incredibly beneficial way.

Next anniversary reflection tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Other scholarly blogs you’d suggest for the weekend list?