Website DIY #15: Networking

This will be a short post… Networking hasn’t taken us from 0 to 100. We are not yet honorary members of the Harvard Lampoon, with sweet jobs waiting for us on graduation like being Frank Rich’s son.

We’re in some Slack channels with other editors. Everyone’s very nice and shares tidbits now and then. But everyone is also so spread out and busy. We’d love to see more ongoing, collaborative projects or energy between all the sites like ours. To do Twitch reading nights or a ‘call-in’/chat show with other editors or a collaborative newsletter or an active web forum or so on. We think there’s a lot more opportunity to do cool work by pooling our energies and all chipping in. But it’s hard to get that going.

What we will say for networking is, if you look at our analytics post, some of our biggest champions are people we knew before: Sam had taken classes with Lillian Stone as classmate, and Caitlin Kunkel as our teacher – both of them helped drive lots of traffic to our site. Caitlin in particular, with whom we worked on our equity guideline.

And then, I guess there’s whatever the future holds: we’ve ‘met’ lots of amazing people during this grant. Hopefully, we were helpful and supportive as editors and are in their good graces. Does this mean a contributor like Kaitlyn Jeffers or Alex Gonzalez is going to hire us to a writer’s room in the next few years when they sell a show (which I don’t even know if that’s something they’re trying to do)? Or that Sophie Geffros will put us in charge of TVO when they take over as Premier in 2024? Yes, it does. Thanks, friends!

No, what I’m trying to say is, the lesson we’re taking is, put yourself out there, meet people, participate in classes, go to shows, make friends, and try to be a kind, constructive, creative person and make the best work you can and support others and do your best to trust the process that, as Tom Scharpling says (to paraphrase), you’ll end up exactly where you’re supposed to be. (Tom would probably agree that life’s often not fair, but I take him to mean: do your best, be a good person, do good work, and you’ve controlled the part you’re able to control. Anything else is up to luck or fate or just surviving long enough to get enough kicks at the can that something breaks through.)

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