General

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13
Jun 10

The Last Time I Posted Here This Was a Web Site

With a little self-deprecation, I tweeted this yesterday:

Goal for tomorrow: Renovate the personal Web site. Yep. Haven’t touched it since it became a website.less than a minute ago via TweetDeckEthan Klapper
ethanklapper

For those who don’t get it, the AP Style for a site on the Internet changed in the middle of April, from Web site to website. The last post here (with so much substance) came before that.

Enough with that. The reason that I haven’t posted much is because I’ve been busy between the end of my junior year and my new internship at BNA, where I cover lots of government-related developments in D.C. (mostly Congress).

Me listening to Sens. Ben Cardin, D-Md., and Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., at a news conference. Photo by @newmediajim.

I have always loved politics (it is my double major), so this internship has been a great way for me to get a front seat to everything that’s going on in D.C. I write for a specialized publication that caters to a diverse group of executives, government staffers and the like. Recently, I’ve been covering lots of banking issues, and this coming week I will be chasing the Small Business Lending Fund Act of 2010 on the floor of the House.

During the course of this internship, I’ve also seen President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama and Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan.

(Yes, I do realize that if I was a seasoned Washington reporter, seeing these people would be just another day at the office.)

But I also love Web journalism. When it’s time to look for jobs in about 10-11 months, how do I put those two interests together? Blogging? Thoughts?

I’ve also been fortunate enough to go to two ONADC meetups in the past two months. I’ve met some really interesting people there, and have learned a lot too.

And, thanks to Digital Capital Week, it seems that I’ve run into some really cool folks from the new local news website TBD on a daily basis. I’m very interested in this new approach to news they’ll be trying. TBD is launching this summer!

I guess you can say I’ve met quite a few people recently thanks to Twitter. Craig Kanalley (@ckanal), an editor for The Huffington Post by day, wrote about this phenomenon yesterday. Ironically, I haven’t met Craig in real life yet, but when I do, it will be because of Twitter.

Speaking of Twitter, that’s probably the best place to find out what I’m up to on a daily basis. I’m at @ethanklapper if you didn’t already know. There’s also my Tumblr and Posterous, which I sometimes find a way to use.

General — 2 Comments
4
Apr 10

Back from the Dead

Silly me.

I was trying to clean out some old MySQL databases from my hosting. In the process, I accidentally deleted the entire database this Web site ran off of.

Not to worry! Because Google cached almost every page and post from this Web site, I was able to do a near-perfect install. Missing is a single post, as well as many tags. But not to worry, pretty much everything has been restored. What a miracle!

Now if I only posted here more often. Hopefully that will change soon!

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11
Dec 09

Yes, I’m Still Alive

Wow, it’s been a while! By my count — and everyone else’s — I have not posted in this space since July. Now, nearly halfway through December and I have completed my fall semester of junior year.

The semester went well — I took mostly classes for my major met a lot of cool people and got rehired as an intern at The Washington Post. This time, I work in the news video department, and we’re in the process of moving from Arlington, Va., to the storied Post building on 15th Street in downtown D.C.

I’ve done lots of work on Web sites lately — hopefully that will actually pay off some day. I’m sure it will — since they say it’s good to be ambidextrous in this new media environment. I was very popular amongst my classmates in a HTML/CSS class I took this past semester.

I’ll be back at The Post next semester — and I hope to share some great new stories along the way. I’m super excited to be working more closely with Post journalists this time around. We used to be separated by the Potomac River, but no more. We “merge” with the paper on Jan. 1 — but that’s a bit of a misnomer since the Web site was always part of The Washington Post Co., just a separate division.

Things at The Eagle have been going well too. The semester definitely ended better there than it started. Working on the Web site has been a test of everyone’s patience, but slowly and surely it’s getting done. I would have liked to see development proceed a faster pace, but I do feel that we’ve come a long way, and that the overall user experience is much improved. I hope to work more on this site in the coming weeks.

So watch this space for more frequent posting — my little pet project over the break is to clean up the site’s design a bit. This is probably the most personal of the posts you’ll see here too!

Later!

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14
May 09

My Upteenth Blogging Journey

Some of you may already know me. Some of you may not.

Either way, welcome to my new blog — a blog that certainly is not my first (and won’t be my last, either).

I started my first blog during the fall of 2007 and shuttered it in March 2008. That was a personal blog of the same name as this one.

I then started another blog in May 2008 and stopped blogging on that one in July 2008. I focused on technology on that one.

In January of this year, I started Social Government, by far my most successful blog. It’s a blog about Government 2.0 (specifically, the use of social media in government) and it can be found at www.socialgovernment.com.

By day, I’m a journalism major at American University in Washington, D.C. By night, I peruse the Interwebs, create and maintain Web sites and write a lot.

I am the Web editor for The Eagle, AU’s student newspaper. We’re in the midst of a massive Web redesign project there.

I’ve also had stints as an intern at mediabistro.com and washingtonpost.com. This summer, I’ll be interning at The Journal News, a Gannett-owned daily in suburban New York.

I hope that you get to know me better through this blog. In turn, I hope I get to know you better, too.

If you’d like to see my more impulsive thoughts, please check out my Twitter and Tumblr. I’ll save this blog for longer-form stuff.

Thanks for coming along for my upteenth blogging journey. You won’t regret it.