The Purpose of Creative Online Journalism

Whatever your goals as a journalist, it's easy to get sidelined by the point and focus more on pay. After all, this is a capitalist world where we're all judged by how much we make. For artists, however, there is a different game. That of recognition, of publishing, of sharing the same view as a reader or holding a completely opposite view, and communicating something the reader never thought of.

This guide explains in detail the purpose of online creative journalism. Not everyone is built for this field, but many who practice online journalism don't even know how powerful they are. I hope to shine a light on that and more.

What is Creative Online Journalism?
Basically, you're writing feature articles, essays, columns, and posts as a journalist in this field. All that sounds familiar until you see "posts," because many don't believe blogging itself is a form of journalism at all. True, you can't call all blogging online journalism, but most of it fits the bill. If you are informing, if you are creating a thesis or idea, and if you are doing these things by writing, you're a classifiable online journalist.

So what do you write? What exact topics for articles, essays, columns and posts do you report on? This is the true freedom: you write mainly what you want, or what you are most experienced in. Newspaper writers often get assignments, and so do you. But your purpose is more in sharing experience, ideas, and interests to readers. It's easier to get excited by someone writing on a topic close to their heart, and easy to get bored when a journalist is forcing the "Top 10 Business Sites" into their writing.

Sharing Experience:
Personal experience is still strong in all forms-magazines, newspaper, television. But even more so online. This is because personal experience pieces are easier to find homes for online. Start a blog, share your tale of surviving a car crash. Find an essay market, share your nightmare of drug addiction. It's not all 1^st person, and the more profitable fields only use experience as proof of what you are saying; if you say you're a business expert, you need to have some experience with it.

Ideas from Start to Finish:
Ideas control most writing, if not all writing. The purpose of online journalism combines experience with ideas. Typically, people online enjoy how-tos in certain fields more than personal experience. For example, you can write an article on how your computer died or an article on how to build a computer, or how to repair a computer. You're ideas often come from personal experience, but just as often from careful research.

Sharing Interests:
Lastly, this is where the true fun for creative online journalism. More than experience and sharing wisdom, more than ideas and selling how-tos, sharing interests catapults the online journalist into a select field. Have a wine collection going back centuries? Have the first edition of every Hemingway novel? Or do you simply enjoy watching movies whenever you get out of work? Your purpose is to share that, to show others more than your experience but in things you know and love.