Linking in

A couple of years ago, I heard WNBC “tech guru” Sree Sreenivasan recommend the free social networking site LinkedIn as indispensable for journalists. I didn’t join then but I have now, and I’ve discovered a few things. First off, it was easy to create my profile. The hardest part was deciding which information to include and make public, but the good news is you can change your mind and your profile any time.

The bad news is that building a list of contacts can become time consuming. Whenever someone agrees to join your network you can browse their contacts and decide if you want to invite any of them to link to you. It’s fun to play “Where are they now?” and reconnect with people you haven’t heard from in years, but it’s easy to get lost in a rabbit hole of searching and clicking.  And I’m still waiting for the “indispensable” part. What exactly is the point of all this linking?

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