By Allan Maurer

UPDATED - RESEARCH TRIANGLE, NC – I’ve got my 10,000 hours in writing for the Web. I started writing for online media in 1999 and averaged 1,000 hours a year or more since.

In his recent book, “Outliers,” Malcolm Gladwell, who also authored “Blink,” makes a case for the theory that it requires about 10,000 hours of practice to make someone an expert at just about anything.

Gladwell describes how Bill Gates, Bill Joy, and Steve Jobs all managed to acquire 10,000 hours on computers well ahead of most everyone else by being in the right place at the right time – leading to their success and riches.

He also shows that the theory applies just as readily to the success of the Beatles, who grabbed their 10K hours playing 12-hour gigs in demanding Liverpool nightspots before exploding into worldwide fame and acclaim. It applies, he suggests, to just about any endeavor.

Gladwell’s book, which I highly recommend, details many other components of “outlier” success, which include such things as the luck to be in the right place at the right time.

Right place, right time

I was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time as well, actually. In 1997 I left a magazine in Charlotte, NC, to freelance as a writer, but I had been working for regional and local publications instead of the national magazines that had been my primary sources of income previously. Let me tell you, it is tough to make a living writing primarily for local and regional publications anywhere, but particularly so outside of major media cities.

I wrote for every publication that bought copy in Charlotte: Creative Loafing, The Charlotte Business Journal, Charlotte Magazine, Charlotte’s Best Magazine, and more, but at the same time was learning to function on the still young Internet. I saw that the Internet was the future of publishing and journalism. I began spending hours every day interacting with people on newsgroups and through email. I began acquiring Internet skills  – in search, security, and instant communication, among others.

You had to learn to avoid what were then called “flame wars,” how to search quickly and effectively – which was a bit more difficult in those days than now, and to double check your writing before zipping it off into cyberspace.

And I went job hunting online.

I also started hunting for an online job. The first company I actually interviewed with, a city site firm doing things similar to those I had done at city focused magazines, just flat turned me down, much to my surprise, considering how qualified I was for the position.

But it was the first of a number of strokes of luck that led me to a new career, and at twice what the company that had turned me down paid.

Pioneering tech news site

There were so many jobs popping up online in mid-1999 I barely hesitated at losing the first gig and moved on to applying for the next. I hit the bullseye with a company called dbusiness dot com (a url now owned by an entirely different company), later renamed LocalBusiness dot com.  It was one of the first national online news sites covering local technology, startups, funding stories, business profiles. It spawned many imitators.

I had the qualifications they wanted. I had worked for daily newspapers as a reporter, was founding editor of two regional business journals (Northeast PA Business Journal is still going), had covered technology for OMNI, Science Digest, and Longevity, among other national magazines, and had written a book about lasers for Arco in the 1980s (Lasers, Lightwave of the Future), among other credits. You could probably pick up a copy at Amazon for a penny plus shipping and handling.

Versatility is always a selling point for a writer. I worked for a wide range of national publications over the years: from Playboy to Modern Maturity (both of which paid in the $1 a word range in the 1980s). I even wrote a seafood cooking column for a national dive magazine called USA Today for seven years.

$10,000 raise in one day

So they hired me. It was unlike any job I’d had before. We were expected to crank out at least four, usually five stories a day. While initially, we rewrote news releases without so much as a call, I began breaking news stories using traditional reporting methods within a month.

“Glad to know someone can find news without using the wire services (Business Wire, PR Newswire, etc.),” my editor said. But still, the sheer amount of copy we were expected to turn out daily was daunting.

I was one of the first reporters for that company to start breaking news about startups landing funding and broke a number of the biggest stories from the Research Triangle area in that arena, beating even AP to some $100 million deals in those heady times. But it was the daily grind of finding stories, finding sources to talk about them, and finding ways to make technology and business less jargon ridden and more easily grasped that was the real training.

I must have been doing something right, because when a then popular technology business magazine called Upside tried to hire me, LocalBusiness gave me a $10,000 raise instantly to beat their offer. The extra money was in my paycheck the next week. I admit, I do miss the way money flew around in those Internet boom years.

I worked for several other online news publications since, and co-founded LocalTechWire.com, now owned by WRAL in Raleigh. I  joined TechJournal South in 2007, and the pace of doing half a dozen stories a day has not slowed. And I’ll say this, once you’ve worked for an online media company, going back to working for a print publication, which I did for a time, feels just like leaving the Interstate where you were doing 80 miles an hour to a back road doing 35.

What I’ve learned

Speed is the main thing I’ve developed working online. That has its consequences, especially working without an editor except Microsoft (and you know how good he is).

The Internet is a hungry beast and has to be fed at regular intervals. Developing that speed was particularly daunting at first, when I worked on an IBM PC dinosaur and dial-up Internet connections. One of the first things I learned was to get high end equipment and the fastest Internet connections I could find. People still comment on how fast I get a story posted following an interview. It wasn’t always that way. When I first started writing for the Web, doing five stories a day felt like whooshing through the galaxy at warp speed.

I also learned the need to be nimble and adaptable, because unlike staid grey lady print media, the Internet media landscape changes rapidly. New technologies, new competitors, new media models, and new tools evolve continually.

Most recently, after years using a variety of proprietary content management systems or tools such as Dreamweaver and FrontPage, I adapted to using WordPress. That added another layer of things to learn.

Learning SEO

Learning SEO, for instance, required paying attention to details that I had never needed to think about before as a writer and editor and in an arena that changes as Google and other search engines refine their algorithms.

How? You can’t skip steps in the SEO process. You have to put in alternative text for images, do the 160 character or less headlines, descriptions and key word lists. You also need to stay abreast of search engine algorithm changes. Finally, you have to look at your analytics regularly to see what stories are working and which are not, the search terms people use to visit your site, and where they are coming from (search engines, organic, or referred).

It’s tough not to make some errors working fast, in quantity, and without an editor.  But people are forgiving of Internet typos and such. You do see them everywhere, including the New York Times and other top publications online.

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that the Internet is largely self-correcting. When I make a mistake, whether it is a typo, a misinterpretation, or bad link, I hear about it from readers and correct it, usually before our eWire goes out in the afternoon.

From the time of that first online position through to the present, I averaged more than 100 hours a month writing for web sites, those I worked for full time, those I created, and those for which I freelanced. You deal with more than just writing web copy doing a job like this.

Adapting is essential

You learn to do most of your own IT, from using increasingly sophisticated applications and technology to managing security and ergonomic considerations. A list of the programs I’ve learned over that time would fill a page, including eight different content management systems.

All of which means that in this job, you don’t stop learning and adapting and maybe that’s the essential lesson?

When you think about it, I fit Gladwell’s other criteria of being in the right place (a market LocalBusiness dot com wanted covered) with the right background (solid journalism credentials and experience as both a business and technology writer), at the right time (the very beginning of daily web-only reporting.) To get that 10,000 hours in, you had to start then or earlier.

I was and I did, so, I should be getting good at this sometime soon.

Email TJS Editor Allan Maurer: Allan at TechJournal South dot com.