Remember to leave zero room in your luggage for this one kind of conference swag

NEW ORLEANS

Online News Association conferences have always been great for swag of one sort or another–socks, reusable shopping bags, bottle openers, reusable water bottles, notepads, and so on. But one of the most useful takeaways from ONA and sometimes other conferences takes up no room in and adds zero weight to my luggage: a new set of headshots.

Having a professionally-taken picture of myself was not among my to-do list items when I started the self-employment adventure in the spring of 2011. According to the Internet Archive, I used a screengrab from one of my few TV appearances on the bio page here, which means I probably used the same low-res picture (in which I look like I’m in my twenties) on LinkedIn.

At some point, I upgraded that bit of personal branding to a picture I took at home with a digital camera on a tripod, which looked a little sharper. But then I saw that an upcoming conference–either ONA or SXSW, I can’t remember which–would have Muck Rack providing free headshots to journalists. So I took the folks at the PR platform, whose newsletter remains a daily read, up on that invitation to have a professional photographer do a better job than I could.

That’s been my practice ever since, ensuring I have a correctly composed, focused and exposed picture I can e-mail to a conference organizer and to use here and LinkedIn. (If you were curious, I’ve stuck to selfies with some D.C. background scenery on Bluesky and Flickr, because that feels like the right thing for those platforms.) I redid that yet again Thursday morning, because my hair no longer looks like it did in the headshot I had taken at ONA in this city in 2019.

By which I mean, it’s grayer everywhere and scarcer in parts, which seems like one of the less painful personal consequences anybody could experience from having lived through the last six years.

#aging #headshots #LinkedIn #marketing #MuckRack #NewOrleans #ONA #OnlineNewsAssociation #photo #photography #portrait #selfie

Daily Public Post #2

Time for my daily public post(the rest are unlisted/quiet place) with updates for the 2nd time of my Wikidata activity.

" TikTok is ‘planning for various scenarios’ ahead of possible US ban (Q131757698) " created and I think I'm done with it.

Updated Alex Heath (Q109500846) with some muckrack and podchaser identifier stuff.

#DailyPublicPost #Wikidata #WikidataActivity #Muckrack #Podchaser

🚀 Exciting Opportunity Alert! 🚀 Join our team at Muck Rack as an Outbound Sales Development Representative! Apply now and let's shape the future of media together! #RemoteJobs #Sales #MuckRack

🌐 APPLY HERE https://zurl.co/yCxK

https://muckrack.com/search/results?q=new.blicio.us

#Muckrack #media #SocialMedia

I'm not quite ready to join Journalist Mastodon (or whatever it is called) but I have just set up a shiny new MuckRack profile:

https://muckrack.com/edent

Mostly to link to the blogs I wrote for other sites.

#Journalist #MuckRack #Portfolio