side project stories | danoshinsky.com

02/11/201903/04/2020

Introducing… Not a Newsletter: A Monthly Guide to Sending Better Emails.

I really believe in side projects. At BuzzFeed, everyone had something interesting they did on the side. I’ve written about some of these side project stories here on the site. I think a great side project can be a valuable tool for showcasing your skills, sharing what you’ve learned, and building communities.

And now might be a good time to mention that I’ve got a new one of my own.

In January, I launched a new monthly briefing around email and newsletters. Every month, I pull together resources — links, news, tips, and other ideas — that might help others send better email. I publish everything in a Google Doc, and since it’s a Google Doc — and not a monthly newsletter that I send out — I call it… Not a Newsletter. (One lesson from my stry.us days: Always pick a name that people will remember and can easily spell.)

Why create something like this? It’s pretty simple: I want to improve the conversation around email, and I want to get as many people as I can involved. I’m following the lead of those in the open-source community: By making all of this accessible to everyone, I’m hoping that others will be able to share their learnings back and build on top of the ideas in the doc. In the long run, I think that the more people we can get involved in this conversation, the better we can make our inboxes.

If you’re interested, check out the doc at notanewsletter.com. And if you’d like to be updated when the next edition goes live, sign up to be alerted at http://signup.notanewsletter.com.

01/14/201901/14/2019

Side Project Stories: Build A Space For Your Passions.

Brian Stelter’s the host of CNN’s “Reliable Sources.” Before that, he was a writer on the media beat for The New York Times.

And before that: He was a college student who launched a widely-read blog about cable news. Here’s his story:

I was a television news junkie, and I wanted to read more about the shows, the stars and the screw-ups.

I was also intrigued by this up-and-coming thing called blogging. In 2003, it suddenly became really easy to set up a blog and start publishing anything, anytime, anywhere. In the days before Facebook and Twitter, this was a revelation.

So in the fall of 2003, when I was starting classes at Towson University, I came up with CableNewser, the name of the website and my anonymous identity. I figured no one at the networks would take me seriously if they knew I was only 18 years old. I started the site on New Year’s Day 2004, when the biggest news involved Deborah Norville’s new MSNBC show and the expansion of CNN’s Inside Politics to Sundays.

The New York Times wrote about his blog back in 2006, and I love this anecdote:

The network publicists generally know his class schedule — afternoons on Tuesdays and Thursdays — and barrage him with material, which they often expect him to post within minutes. While recording a radio segment for one of his classes — Mass Communication 381 — he turned his cellphone off for 15 minutes, then turned it back on to find one nagging voice mail message from an ABC publicist and another from CNN.

I remember reading about Brian’s site when I was in college. It was such a simple idea: He loved cable news, and wanted to write more about it, so he created his own space to do so. A few friends and I were inspired by stories like his. I had a few small blogs in college, mostly about Mizzou sports. None were particularly good, but they gave me a space to collaborate with friends and try to learn how to write online. The goal wasn’t to become nationally-read sportswriters — although, secretly, I think we all thought we were a story or two away from being big names. We just wanted a place to write and write often.

Whatever your passions, find a friend who cares about that same thing, and make something with them: a blog, a podcast, a newsletter. You never know where it might lead you.

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That MSNBC screengrab — I wonder what happened to the “I-PHONE”? — is used here thanks to a Creative Commons license.

08/12/201808/11/2018

Side Project Stories: Build The Internship You Really Want.

A post shared by Chatham Anglers (@chathamanglers) on Jul 4, 2016 at 5:50pm PDT

In the spring of 2006, I was finishing up my freshman year at Mizzou, and trying to find an internship for the spring. I was too young for jobs at a big paper — they were looking for a junior or senior who they could hire soon. So I tried two different avenues: One was to apply to smaller papers back home in Washington, D.C.; the other was to try to convince an organization that didn’t have a media presence to let me create one for them.

There’s a college all-star baseball league in the D.C. area, with a team about 15 minutes from where I grew up. I shot their general manager a note, and asked if they wanted someone to “cover” the team for the summer. I’d write game stories and longer features on the team, and cut together video that we’d put on YouTube. It was a low-risk kind of ask. I wasn’t looking for housing, or even to get paid. They didn’t have anyone who did that kind of work already, so anything I contributed would be a bonus for them.

The team said yes — but so did a paper in D.C., and they were offering the chance to cover a handful of teams, including the Washington Nationals. I took the job at the paper.

But here’s a story from The Ringer about Dan D’Uva, who actually followed through on the idea of creating his own summer internship program on Cape Cod, in their famed college baseball all-star league:

In 2002, D’Uva and his New Jersey high school classmate Guy Benson came to the Cape and told the Chatham brain trust they wanted to be the team’s announcers. No team in the league had announcers. But D’Uva and Benson had an unusual sense of purpose. “They were like laser beams,” Bob Sherman, the A’s vice president, said.

D’Uva and Benson called games featuring Evan Longoria, Andrew Miller, and Todd Frazier. When D’Uva graduated from college and began his long climb through the minor leagues, he volunteered to run the Chatham internship program…. When former Chatham interns started getting jobs at MLB Network and Colbert and with various minor league teams, word got around the broadcasting factories of Syracuse and Arizona State that the Chatham job was the one to score.

D’Uva’s now the voice of the Vegas Golden Knights hockey team — logging thousands of hours on air during his high school and college years surely helped — and the broadcasting program he started in 2002 is one of the most desirable broadcasting internships in sports.

This is exactly the kind of thing an ambitious college — or high school! — student could try. Maybe there’s a minor league baseball team near you that could use a photographer to run their Instagram, or a museum in your hometown that would love to start a podcast series. Maybe you could do something part time — just a few hours on a weekend — and combine that with a summer job to help pay the bills. Be ambitious and pitch the internship you want. You might end up building something that could be great for your future career.

07/21/2018

Side Project Stories: A Broadcaster’s First Radio Broadcast.

I was reading this story about John Strong, the lead announcer for Fox at this year’s World Cup, and loved this anecdote:

Early in his senior year in high school, Strong roped a friend from the school paper, Eric Olson, into helping him launch an online radio station. Olson helped with funding and the two split announcing duties while broadcasting their high school’s football games. This was 2002, at the tail end of the dial-up era and three years before the launch of YouTube. No one in charge of the school knew what the pair of friends were talking about, but the principal signed off all the same. A few months later, Olson and Strong were calling Lake Oswego football online, with the help of a computer whiz friend who handled the technical aspects. At the time, there were roughly ten such high school stations broadcasting online anywhere. “Do I have the first clue what I am doing?” Strong remembers. “Not really. I am taking all those years of doing it in my head or out loud at the TV and all the stuff I have heard on the TV and I am sort of trying to figure it out. We didn’t have commercials; it was just us online.”

I’ll say it again: You don’t need to wait for someone to give you permission to get the experience, skills, or opportunities you want. You’re good enough to start right now. Find a friend and launch a project. It doesn’t have to be great — just be willing to try something new.