Ryan Pyle Blog: 6 Months of Emptiness

Hello,

My efforts to "ramp up" my blog and make it a staple to the way I work has failed miserably.

If you take a look at when my last blog was it was May 23rd, from when I was covering an earthquake in China's Sichuan province. Since then I've added almost nothing to this blog. What's sad is that I've had an incredibly interesting few months of work and I have a lot of unique and interesting stories to share. Which leads me to the central question, why am I not blogging?

The answer has two very clear sides to it. The first is that I don't actually enjoy telling people where I am or what I am doing. Much of this comes from working in a country where the government puts a lot of pressure on foreign journalists. The second reason, and perhaps more importantly, is that I work in a hyper competitive environment being based in China. I'll just take a moment to look at each of these individually.

The government does make life difficult, exceedingly so for freelance journalists who don't have an accredited news company or publication behind their efforts, to access certain places in China for reporting. And I don't feel like letting everyone know where I am and what I am doing all the time. And saying you'll blog about something interesting later once you return to Shanghai never really works. So often I just end up writing nothing. Sad but true.

The second reason is that China is swimming with photographers, up to the brim. And I prefer not to talk too much about my work or what I am up to. Am I too sensitive? Perhaps. Is my work that interesting? Maybe not, but nonetheless that's how I feel about it.

My goals to improve my blog include trying to update my readers with more information about stories that I've completed and avoid discussing about what's in the pipeline. I hope that still makes for an interesting read. I'll also still try to communicate certain frustrations I have working in China and make people aware of certain long term projects, gallery shows and lectures that I'm involved with.

I hope I can stick with that. For those who want more up to date info just add me to your facebook, I tend to use my facebook page as a bit of a working blog so that my friends and family can also see what's going on. And facebook is much more picture and link friendly than this blog space........or at least it's more friendly for people like me who are barely computer literate.

Thanks for listening.


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Cheers,

Ryan Pyle
Photographer
ryan@ryanpyle.com
Website: www.ryanpyle.com
Archive: http://archive.ryanpyle.com
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