Thursday, December 07, 2006

Knowledge workers, not reporters

I've been at my new job for a few days and already feel the strangeness of being among knowledge workers, not journalists (in the strict sense). I have been assigned a workspace at the sorta-research unit of LETA, called nozares or branches of industry. One of my jobs will apparently be to edit the telecoms branch online infobase. That's where the knowledge work begins, because it is basically selecting, editing, putting in and placing (plus writing an analysis now and again) stuff written or compiled by others. There is no story here, or rather, the story is neverending and needs to be managed and sorted, rather than reported. Hence all the other folks just sit at their PCs (yuck) all day and do stuff for their respective branch databases. I'm not knocking this, it takes smarts to do this kind of stuff and not put EU statistics on dogfood production in the energy files or something like that.
The other thing I'm doing is writing a magazine article for Kapitals, a glossy business monthly affiliated with LETA. Magazines don't carry stories as in news and tommorrow's paper or even something that may appear on this blog. Well, gotta get used to it and it's not like I haven't done magazines, hell, I was writing for the monthly Sweden Now (dead now) back in the 1980s and have done stuff for various other mags, such as Institutional Investor (they paid better than the boringness of their title).
Another thing I have done in beta is start my Latvian language blog on more or less the same stuff that I write here. My first post was a long compilation of what I thought was important in the telco world at present -- the ITU World Telecoms 2006 in Hong Kong (no videocasts available without some complicated mediaregistration that is practically impossible online, so f**k 'em *), various stuff in the mobile WiMax space announced there, some other ramblings I have forgotten. We may actually launch the thing next week or whatever.
As for news, I am thinking of simply doing any exclusives I have (and I do have some up my sleeve, a big hush hush IT deal with Fritz as the Latvians would say) in the blog, then let the agencies grab it. LETA's first new media venture will have it first, anyway. Or maybe talk to the managers about that....

*If I actually write fuck, will more of you show your appreciation for the uncensored version by clicking on some ads along the side so I make, like three American centavos? :)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Will be waiting for your telecoms industry reviews as currently I feel quite passive public voice of telecommunication companies in Latvia. They all are either afraid of communicating about themselves externally or they may be suffer from the typical Latvian "locality". Don't know. As well hope it will be good source of qualitative information to expand discussions on telecomblog.lv, where I write my thoughts and observations about the industry happenings.

All in all - best wishes to make bigger cash :), to get new colleague-friends and to inspire us with great news!