Featured Career: Digital Editor
Time for another featured career! I actually have three featured careers lined up in a row over the next three weeks and they are all so interesting! Hope you guys enjoy them!
As always, if you’re interested in being featured please shoot me an email or leave a comment on this post letting me know 
Here are the last five careers I’ve featured and you can find ALL my career features HERE! If you are interested in being featured please don’t hesitate to contact me!
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Today please welcome eemusings from Musings of an Abstract Aucklander.
My title is digital editor – so I handle all things online for our magazine (a business publication with a twist – it’s about creatives, it’s about innovation, it’s about entrepreneurship) and also have responsibility for a few print sections.
I did a communications degree majoring in journalism while working part time at one of the two big news organisations here, which really got me started in the industry.
Meanwhile, I’ll also be moderating comments, checking traffic and analytics, taking care of social media (posting links, engaging with followers, resharing content, looking for story ideas), keeping an eye on other media, reaching out to potential guest posters, editing contributions, organising giveaways, liaising with sources and writers over upcoming stories for the next issue, formatting and publishing stories from the mag online, prepping for and conducting interviews and occasionally heading out to cover events (live tweeting conferences is always good fun).
Least favourite thing has to be tech woes, be it slow internet (I always need to be connected, obviously, so I just don’t have time for slow speeds) or slow systems. I guess that’s endemic to many jobs though. More specific would be operating on a shoestring (there is only so much I can cover myself/source for free) or dealing with the occasional difficult PR person (I deal with some great PR/marketing types, but there are a few who just don’t have a clue).
I love the variety and I love how rewarding it is – I get to talk to all kinds of inspiring, successful and creative people; it never gets old. There’s always something to be done and the days fly by. And I largely work autonomously. I more or less get to set out my own days and definitely have a real sense of ownership.
What is something about your job that surprises people?
Probably just how many hats I wear. I am writer, sub, and editor all in one; community manager (manage multiple brand social profiles), write for both online and print, go to events,do our daily, weekly and fortnightly newsletters (for which I create/source all the content), general admin tasks, and deal with hundreds of emails a day.
Varied!
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Question of the day: Do you wear several different hats at your job?
Hacked
I hope everyone had a wonderful New Years weekend! Mine was pretty good and laidback. New Years Eve is not a big thing for us at all so we just stayed in and relaxed. We made homemade sushi, had a couple apple martini’s and watched movies. Lovely!
Today is my last day of vacation and I’m determined to be productive and get organized and ready to go back to work tomorrow! The good news is I’m really looking forward to going back to work and getting back to a schedule. 10 days off is a long time for someone like me who craves structure and routine.
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Anyways, this blog post is not about that, it’s about the lovely news that I woke up to on Friday morning; my email and Facebook had been hacked.
I think we’ve all got those hacked emails before, I know have. But mine seemed to have been hacked on a colossal scale. Not only did they email over 600 email contacts that I’ve collected over the past several years they also emailed all my Facebook friends with an email address.
Then to top it all off they deleted every single email in my gmail folders from the last 3+ years. Every single wedding email. Every single email related to my freelance work. Everything.
After lots of investigation and reading through google forums and filling out complaints with Facebook I think I’ve *kind of* figured out ways I could have done things differently. Considering what a huge loss this was for me I thought I’d share those things with my readers so no-one goes through the same thing!
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1. Have a different password for your facebook and your email
OK, this might be obvious, but I did not know this so I was using the same email address AND password to both. I have reason to believe the hacker originally gained access to my facebook account, likely through one of the many third party apps I’ve allowed to access my facebook information, and then tried using the information on my email and lucked out. This was definitely an actual person and not a virus and the IP address google tracked led to somewhere in Nigeria.
2. Use the two-step verification process gmail offers
When using this verification process in order to log into your gmail from any computer other than your regular one you need to enter your password AND a verification code that google texts to your phone. You can then choose to save that verification code on the computer for 30 days or not. If I had had this set-up before the hacker never would have got onto my email in the first place. Instructions for setting this up can be found here. It’s super simple!
3. Back-up your emails
I lost thousands of emails on Friday. Most of them didn’t matter but some of them did. At the time it felt devastating to lose so much information. This wouldn’t have been a problem if my emails were backed up. There are ways to back it up to your harddrive, others also suggested making a separate, ‘secret’ email address that you forward important emails to and there are several third party web services like Backupify you can use.
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Last Friday was a really bad day for me. I was getting phone calls and my parents were getting phone calls wondering if I really was stuck in Spain. My @replies on Twitter and texts were blowing up letting me know I’d been hacked and I spent several hours in front of my computer trying to recover the lost emails. I’m STILL locked out of my Facebook account three days later, which is starting to get quite annoying. I wish they’d get back to me already!
However, in hindsight, the lost emails really AREN’T that big of a deal. And now I get to start 2012 with a nice, cleaned out inbox Trying to find the silver lining here!
If anyone else has any advice to avoid being hacked please leave it in the comments section!
Images From My Weekend
One of my favourite things about Twitter (are you on it? Follow me!) is twitpics! I loveee when people send pictures to Twitter and I love sharing some of my own.
This weekend I shared more twitpics than normal so I thought I’d share them with you on the blog as well. These are all taken on my blackberry so please disregard the poor quality of the photos
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I’m participating in The Many Thoughts of a Reader book club for the first time ever this month. So fun!
I started reading “In The Woods” this weekend and really like it so far. I love the mystery/crime genre.
I headed out for our group run on Saturday morning despite it being -16 C (3 F) outside. I bundled up a lot for it and, I won’t lie, it was COLD but by the end of 7 miles I was warmed right up and glad I went!
Once I got back from my run I made us smoothies. Eric is trying to eat a little healthier after seeing Brendan Brazier speak with me so he’s been having smoothies every day – I even got him to try a green smoothie!
Sunday morning he wanted orange juice in his smoothie (FYI orange does NOT go well with spinach!) so it was green for her and purple for him! I’ve started adding soft tofu to my smoothies for extra protein and it works great – you can’t even taste it but it gives it some more staying power.
We don’t have cable, but in today’s internet world – who needs it anyways? Last night I streamed the Oscars on Eric’s laptop (thank you watch-oscar-online.com!) and tweeted/blogged/facebooked/video chatted on mine.
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How was your weekend? If you could share ONE image from your weekend what would it be?