Daily Photo News and Journalism Roundup for Tuesday, July 28, 2020
A daily compilation of photography, journalism, and content creation news and resources written or curated by Sean Sosik-Hamor. Not everything posted is breaking news but is something that piqued his interest while researching or fact-checking other stories. Daily roundups may be briefer on days where Sean is working on other stories.
Spier Wine Farm Light Art Exhibition, Stellenbosch, Western Cape, South Africa. Photograph by Sean Sosik-Hamor.
We Hire Bloggers Who Immediately Stop Blogging
By Sean Sosik-Hamor for Inert Ramblings
Years ago in 2007, when I first joined Canonical as a staffer, I attended their yearly in-person all-hands meeting during my second week of employment. During the opening plenary, after the icebreaker where all new employees were asked to stand up and explain the history of their IRC pseudonym, the presenter lamented, “We hire bloggers who immediately stop blogging.”
Read more at Inert Ramblings →
I absolutely loved working for Canonical, it was by far my dream job, and most of my back-end server infrastructure is currently based on Ubuntu LTS. But it took many years for Canonical for embrace blogging as part of an employee’s daily workflow.
AP Will Continue to Lowercase White
This morning’s AP Stylebook email newsletter included the confirmation that AP will continue to lowercase white in racial, ethnic and cultural senses. This decision follows AP’s June decision to capitalize Black and Indigenous. The newsletter also announced that AP will be holding a Twitter chat on race-related terms this coming Wednesday at 2:30 p.m. EDT using hashtag #APStyleChat.
Stop Blogging on Medium if You Care About SEO
As a followup to yesterday’s story, Trouble in Photography SEO Paradise with SmugMug and Squarespace, I found a great post by Paweł Urbanek titled Stop Blogging on Medium if You Care about SEO. It’s a great read and goes into the repercussions of “nofollow” tags on websites.
Urbanek’s story caught my eye because I syndicate my articles to Medium specifically to improve my SEO. Luckily, how I use Medium is an edge case. I don’t rely in Medium to be the primary host of my content. Instead, I import my stories into Medium, which sets the “canonical” tag to indicate that the article on my own website is the original source.
That way my article is promoted to Medium’s users. My previous assumption was that my article would also get a slight boost in SEO reputation because it’s available on Medium as well, but time will tell.
Either way, setting the “canonical” tag within my story on Medium ensures that Google credits my own website as the source of the article.
