Helen FieldsScience Writer

Check it out – a blog about the excavations at La Brea tar pits, by one of the paleontologists working on it. (I was there the other day.)

Back in the fall, when the media world started feeling the drop in advertising and laying off lots of people, the blog hosting people at Typepad came up with a nice little program: Typepad for Journalists. They’d give you a free pro account, tech support, maybe help you put ads on your site. All about helping newly-unemployed journalists by giving them a home in the digital world.

When I got laid off in November, I knew one of the first things I wanted to do was set up a website and a blog. I figured the two best choices were Typepad and Wordpress, so I sent off an application to the Typepad for Journalists program to get that ball rolling in case it ended up seeming like the better deal. But I decided Wordpress would work better for me, and I kind of forgot about the Typepad thing.

So here’s a little timeline. Dec. 17, 2008: I send a message to Typepad telling them I want a blog. Jan. 16, 2009: They tell me I’m accepted to their program. (Everyone was – I’m not that special.) Sept. 25, 2009: They send me my discount code so I can register and start blogging.

Uh, yeah. Waiting nine months to start a blog – that’s definitely the way to show you’re on top of the news.

A friend of mine who prefers to remain nameless on the internet moved to China at the end of August, and she’s started a blog. So we can all follow along!

She’s a fellow science writer who is trying out teaching English for a while. This is pretty cool – she had a job with an ending date, she’d poked around for other jobs unsuccessfully, she had been taking Chinese for a while, and she decided, what the heck – I’ll move to China. And that’s what she did. (She’d also been to China for a month and liked it, so this wasn’t totally insane.) Go Anonymous Friend!