The media bloggers at the PJ Challenge Bloggers 'K'arnival

If the first person who did the presentation was a celebrity blogger, the next blogger is what I would label a media blogger. His name is Niki Cheong and he is a journalist. He has a blog called the Niki Cheong.com and he manages the Youth section of one of the biggest newspaper in Malaysia, the Star. It was quite surprising that he still manages to blog as other than doing reporting, he has a column in that newspaper. I mean, this guy writes nearly 24/7. It can be said that he really writes for a living.

Here's a picture of the handsome Bangsar Boy

However, his presentation was more on the part of balancing your time as a journalist, a columnist and a blogger. He told us of how in one assignment in which he had to travel to Laos for an assignment he used the same idea on all his column, his write up and his blog. Only the approaches were different for each articles that he churned out. One was for a whole section of the newspaper, a kind of an expose of the plight of people in Laos. As for his fortnightly column is the beauty of the country. And finally, for his blog, he puts up the travel itself in which he told us that one of the surprising thing that he experience was when they had to drive on the left side of the road which felt so wrong for an Asian country (we mostly drive on the rightside of the road as mostly were colonised by British one time or another).

It was enlightening to see a journalist using blog to actually practise his craft though there was a lot of hoopla about journalist crossing the invisible line which made the humans in recent time in Malaysia. Journalists are supposed to be read, not seen and when one reporter was thrown out of State Assembly, she started twitting and it became a big news. It was supposed to put faces to the those who wrote those articles in the newspaper. I do have some thoughts on this which I will write my thoughts on the issue of the death of journalism.

Oh, and that hat? That is his trademark...

p/s - I am actually trying to really recall what each presenter was presenting as they had slides which are not available for us to download or access to. Although these bloggers told us tales of how they became bloggers and how they blog every other day, no one realised they are actually telling a very soft science which if collected can be a guide to those who wants to make this a supplemental income or even a career