Success on the Interwebz

When flipping through the top bloggers slideshow, all I could think of was "Why didn't I think of that?" Many of these people had an idea and ran with it, not knowing whether their idea would be a hit on the Internet or will fall by the wayside.

I Can Has Cheezburger? is a great example of a blog that started as a simple picture of a cat and rocketed to the top of the blogosphere. The trick to Internet success is finding something that people like and will keep coming back for more. ICHC discovered people's love for lolcats. So many people visit the blog that the creators no longer have to contribute much to the content on the site. Fans can submit pictures and captions and vote on the funniest submissions.

The 1,000 true fan theory can also be applied to blogs. As long as you have 1,000 dedicated fans who will read your blog, share it on their social media sites, and purchase any merchandise you may sell, you have made it online. One key factor to maintaining this fan base is to keep in contact with your audience. Besides updating your blog hourly or daily, however you run your blog, you should also create Twitter and Facebook accounts to keep in touch with your fans while you are not posting new contant. Engage your readers, get them to provide feedback on your site, ask them for content suggestions, etc. Eventually these true fans will help to move your blog and give it more popularity, hopefully creating a higher income for you and a bigger fan base as well.

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

Imagine being put in jail, full-well knowing you were innocent, but because of a lack of information presented during the trial you were wrongly convicted. That is exactly what happened to Donald Watkins.

In 2007, Watkins was convicted of murder and home invasion and sentenced to 56 years in prison. With the help of the journalism and law students at Northwestern University, Watkins received a second chance at justice.

Journalism students took Watkins' case into their own hands and dug up some interesting facts. The students at Medill put their investigative reporting skills to work and discovered that some very important information was missing from the trial. The students took matters into their own hands by re-interviewing key witnesses and reporting on the new found facts. Because of the persistent and probing questions that the students at Northwestern asked, they were able to give Watkins a second chance.

How come it took the work of some journalism and law students to get the courts to rethink their decision that effected a man's freedom?

Fifty Shades of Victorian Women

The Fifty Shades of Grey book series has created quite a stir among women and this is especially surprisingly considering our society is vastly different from that of the Victorian Age. If fiction literature was able to create many heated discussions in the 21st century, you can only imagine what kind of conversations were being had about real life situations in the late 1860s.

Women began to question their marriage vows and wondered what about a man defined her as a human being. "I am a free lover," Victoria Woodhull, founder of sexual reform paper Woodhull & Claflin once said. During the late 1800s another type of reform swept over America, sexual reform. Previously women were bound to their husbands because they were supposed to be their protectors, but in many instances the husbands became the abusers. Women had very little voice in any matter and some women like Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin began a newspaper in an effort to improve women's rights. Though they had their own struggles, like the unethical way Claflin went about acquiring advertisements. Despite this, Woodhull & Claflin was able to achieve a circulation much larger than that of The Liberator as well as received praise from major newspapers like The New York Herald.

One of the main issues that sexual reform papers like Woodhull's tackled was marriage. Woodhull like many girls dreamed of marrying a handsome husband who could protect and provide for the family, instead many including Woodhull married a man who lied about his profession, was an alcoholic and as a result was unable to provide for the family he created with Woodhull. Other papers called marriage a master and slave relationship. The women had very little say in a marriage, often if they were abused no one would believe them. Men were allowed to have relationships with other women, they could break off their marriage, but women weren't given this right.

References to sex was even more of a taboo topic in the late 1800s than it can be today and the newspapers tried to fix this issue. In Victorian America, words like intercourse and genitals were condemned, but publications began using them. The writings of Angela Heywood could be seen as an early version of Fifty Shades of Grey. Heywood wrote freely and did not hold back on her choices of words.

Women took a big risk when they began the sexual reform, but had it not been for those couple of women who knows when a women's right to marriage would have begun to change.

The Fight for Our Rights

We often find ourselves complaining about our 9-5 job or that we sometimes have to call into the office on weekends, so it is probably hard to imagine working from sun up to sun down six days a week. During the nineteenth century when Americans were working 60+ hours a week, they had very few outlets to express the frustration of their long works hours at the factories. During the late 1820s, several newspapers that supported workers' rights began to form. Notable publications included, the Mechanic's Free Press, Spirit of the Age and Workingmen's Advocate. One major task that these newspapers set out to accomplish was the ten hour workday. Willy Heighton of the Mechanic's Free Press, wrote how he rarely saw the sun his whole life since he started working at such a young age. Because many people like Heighton began working as a child, he missed many childhood opportunities such as attending school. Because workers now had a way for their voices to be heard, they also tried to get children educated instead of having them work in the factories. Makes you re-think complaining your 9-5 job right?

Another issue that plagued America in the nineteenth century was slavery. One of the best call-to-action newspapers was The Liberator. William Lloyd Garrison began The Liberator as an anti-slavery publication. What made Garrison's newspaper different from the others was that he included both sides of the stories, creating one of the first open forums in journalism. The Liberator was extremely effective in the way that southern governmental bodies tried to prevent the newspaper from being published and distributed. It is hard to come up with any modern day publications that have had such a large effect on the public. After running for thirty-five years, after achieving the goal it set out to do, The Liberator was published one last time. Garrison's newspaper played a vital role in abolishing slavery by giving information to the people and letting them decide for themselves if slavery should be illegal.

"A woman is nobody. A wife is everything." This statement seems to just beg for a heated debate. As a result, The Revolution evolved. The Revolution tackled the tough topic of women's rights and this newspaper like the ones previously discussed gave a voice to those that would have otherwise not been heard. Stanton and Anthony, the two founders of the newspaper, called for equal pay for women, political representation as well as speaking up about the taboo topic of abortion. For each of these topics, the women provided anecdotes along with facts that supported their stands. Though The Revolution did not have as long of a run as The Liberator, it packed a punch among it's readers and led the way to the Women's Rights Movement several decades later.

 If only modern media were as affective as the newspapers in the nineteenth century.