This year I finally went all digital when it comes to saving my published articles. I’ve been clipping my stories from newspapers for nearly 30 years. I’ve got boxes of “clips” – that’s what old-time print journalists call their saved articles. My clips go back to my days at the Daily Illini, the college newspaper at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
For decades, when journalists applied for jobs, they’d provide their clips as samples of their work. Articles now can be e-mailed as attachments or sent as weblinks.
I suppose the word clips is going to end up in the dustbin of outmoded journalism terms like “slug” and “spike.”
Since the start of the year, I’ve been saving PDFs of my work. PDF stands for portable document format, a standard developed by Adobe Systems. As I’ve stated previously, you can’t trust weblinks to work one month to the next. So I’m hoping the PDF format will stand the test of time.
Photo: One of my recent articles from IBD.
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