by Denise

I’m currently working out of CMC’s third office, Sparrows. Relatively speaking, today has been a slow(er) day. Much of my job is about keeping everything on track, so once the copy is written and links linked, what’s left is the people side of things, which relies on a convergence of schedules.

A pleasant surprise is although it’s normally a very full ten-to-six, I spend so much of my personal time networking for this project in a way that tells me I love my job enough thus far not to cage it in an eight-hour pen. To me, it isn’t just a job. It’s something I moved 2,000 miles for. It’s something I believe in. It’s ideals and principles. In my free time, I’ve been attending GR events and getting to know the city, but it never fails that at least a couple times per night, I’m handing out my business card or mingling with people who already create remarkable content. We’re currently in the process of trying to network for coverage on ArtPrize and ArtPeers (ideas on how to cover both? Let us know!).

In this relative “down time,” I’ve been getting back into the Twitter swing and keeping up on web 2.0, the shaping of 3.0 and journalism industry leads. The most mind boggling but brilliant work advice I ever got was from an associate editor at In These Times. We’re in journalism, she told me. Feel free to spend the first two or three hours of the day getting up to speed on the news. A day passed while you were sleeping.

Of course, my editor meant politics and current events. But since then, I’ve realized that hefty digest is where ideas are born, where the leads are. It’s the key to thinking innovatively. Hopefully in a matter of months, we’ll be one of those sites, too—the kind you have with your morning cup o’ joe.