Then the computer ate my blog post. Actually, I got busy with some other projects that day, decided to finish the post the next day and shut down the computer without realizing I hadn’t saved all my brilliant work (and apparently whatever auto-save feature WordPress.com uses isn’t available on WordPress.org, or I haven’t activated it yet). All my brilliant observations vanished into the electronic ether. And I haven’t been able to face doing it all over again.

Then it dawned on me. One of the biggest takeaways from the ONA conference was that good enough is good enough. There are some times when anything less than perfect won’t do, like an investigative piece that’s based on number crunching, court documents and multiple interviews. There’s no way to publish that kind of thing before it’s cooked.

But for some things, like blog posts that are observational v. reported, good enough is good enough. Sure it would have been great to have had the complete 10-step manifesto I’d almost finished on what journalists need to do in order to make it in the brave new world of online media. But I don’t.  And I was stuck on not having perfect. So instead of going with what I had, I stalled out, waiting for inspiration to strike, or enough time to materialize on my calendar to write the whole damn thing over again.

Well, that’s not going to happen, thanks to a confluence of work and life events that’s made me busier than I have been in a while.

So I’m going with what I’ve got. And I’m asking readers to make this an interactive experience. I’ll share some of the tidbits I picked up at the Online News Association conference, and you share what you learned. And instead of one big long blog posts, I’ll share my lessons learned in a trickle, with your help, starting tomorrow.

I’m adopting the ‘good enough’ mind set for my paid assignments too. Sometimes if a project is important enough, it pays – literally – to spend that extra day doing additional research or that extra hour or two writing or editing. But other projects don’t call for that kind of meticulousness. I’m not talking about fudging the reporting or failing to live up to the terms of a contract. A 500 word story doesn’t have to be the definitive account of a subject: if you write about something often enough, 500 words might cover one small corner of a topic that you can revisit again and again.

I’m also taking a similar approach to the redesign of this blog, which some of you have already noticed has changed rather dramatically in the past week. Once again, I wanted to wait until everything was perfect before announcing it to the world. Instead I’m taking a page from my techie friends and going with what I’ve got now, and will tweak what needs tweaking as I go.

I’ve been working behind the scenes for the last couple weeks with a very talented Web design partner and fellow freelance writer Ron S. Doyle to give WordCount a look worthy of the subjects I cover. I think he did a splendid job – a round of applause for Ron please. If you usually read WordCount through your RSS feed, come take a look at the site and let me know what you think.