Journalism, which includes magazine articles, blogs, and travelogues, has been a favorite activity of mine for a long time. I have really enjoyed going on location, taking in the local color, speaking with talent and celebrities, covering events, ghost writing, penning contributing articles, and writing about all kinds of subjects—especially for pop-culture, product announcements, consumer protection, how-tos, and special events.
Below are links to the various journalistic articles that I have written, published, and posted over the years.
Travelogues
During my corporate hiatus between L-1 Identity Solutions and Satcon Technology Corp. I spent some time as a blogger ca. 2009 – 2010. My first real blogging gig was with Beantown Socialite owned and operated by Kristen Haley of X10Industries (now called Zomalo) at the time.
She’s since moved to Newport Rhode Island and runs a similar enterprise down there called Newport Social.
Sometime after I stopped writing for Beantown, the site was migrated from its original server to a WordPress-based server (the domain name beantownsocialite.com now points to zomalo.com. Though the copy, styles, and external links, were successfully transferred to the new hosting site; unfortunately, the images and relative links (for multi-part articles) were not. I have no idea why her tech. did not move the images over as well.
So the following 3-part article on Quebec City (among others of mine) has been sitting on the current Beantown Socialite WordPress site for years without its images and no internal links connecting the parts.
But since I’ve been building this portfolio of my work, I thought it would be nice to restore at least this article to its former glory: images and relative links and all.
This took quite a while, so I probably won’t be doing it for the other ones any time soon. However, you can get a sense of the Travelogue Writing aspect of my Journalism Writing with this article that was published in Summer/Fall of 2010 on Beantown Socialite.
You can read my other Beantown Socialite articles here (sans the images and relative links).
Note: As per my usual digital writing style, all images, links, and the pages themselves are maxed out with SEO content.
Enjoy!
Quebec City: A Little Piece Of Europe Just North Of The Border
By Nick Iandolo
Editorial Publishing
Whereas Beantown Socialite was an online blog-based publication, I also had the opportunity to write for a local Rhode Island print and web magazine called Motif Magazine.
I started with them back in 2012. Their Owner and Publisher, Mike Ryan, was an acquaintance of mine from our days as members of the Rhode Island Film Collaborative. Those were good days.
I’m no longer a member though but that is another story.
Note: The article title links below will take you directly to the articles on the Motif website.
A Tale of Two Cons
By Nick Iandolo
Mike knew of my passion for Comic Cons, and was aware that I’d be attending the big one, San Diego Comic-Con, in 2012—my very first time at that mega-convention.
I was so psyched that when I got back and was ranting to Mike about it he asked me if I’d like to cover the freshmen year of the new Rhode Island Comic Con (RICC) later that November.
I said, “Yes,” and the following article was born: A Tale of Two Cons.
This article appeared in both the print magazine and the webzine. To see the clip of what it looked in the print version click here.
Embracing the Chaos—Rhode Island Comic Con Rights the Ship
By Nick Iandolo
Fast forward a few years and I had been covering Rhode Island Comic Con for four years.
The 2014 RICC was quite an event! Not in a good though. It seems that the con was way oversold and the fire marshall closed the doors in the middle of the Saturday part of the convention—locking out thousands of fans, artists, and vendors on an exceptionally cold and blustery day in November! It was a media and public relations disaster for the company that runs the event, Altered Reality Entertainment. I document the entire pop-culture con meltdown in my Motif article titled: Rhode Island Comic Con Growing Pains.
The following year, 2015, RICC made Herculean efforts to redeem themselves and fix what happened in that disastrous Junior year. Which they did!
As a member of the press, I was invited to witness and document every aspect of the convention and the major strides they made to turn things around.
The following article, Embracing the Chaos—Rhode Island Comic Con Rights the Ship, is that epic documenting of the event.
It should be noted that this was a nearly 12,000 word article! In fact, Mike Ryan once said about me, “Nick is the only writer that I know who can take 100 words and turn them into 1000!” That’s the kind of writer I am. Literally two days after the convention, when one of the editors called me and asked how the article was coming along, I answered with, “It’s done: 12000 words!” She was floored, and so was Mike!
Here is the article in all of its 12K word glory!
I have a lot more articles that I wrote for Motif available here. Lots of them were on other topics like movie and documentary reviews, interviews with local pop-culture celebrities, an on-set coverage of a film production, a horror convention coverage, commentaries, and more. There’s also an epic 4-article series covering the 2013 San Diego Comic-Con!
I did a lot writing for Motif, made some good friends there, and had some good times (including producing and co-hosting with Rosemary Pacheco a movie review show called Take 2, and being an awards-show presenter).
Here’s one of our better episodes:
However, just like my days at Dedham Television/DVAC, they had to come to an end, and I needed to move on to new and exciting opportunities.
Commercial Blogging
Master the iOS Photos App with These Hidden Gems
By Nick Iandolo
Sometime during March/April of 2017 I took a job as a Staff Writer for an Commercial Blog that focused on consumer electronics (e.g. smart phones), Internet user technology (e.g. WordPress), technical how-tos, user-tech online courses, and technology-business-related eBooks. The company/blog was called Make Tech Easier.
This was a great gig! I got paid to write articles (i.e. blog posts) from home. I loved the idea of working for a company was so decentralized that my editor was in Singapore and my fellow writers were all over the world. We used Hipchat to meet online and discuss business (story pitches, writing advice, etc.).
Now without further adieu here is an example of the types of articles that I wrote for Make Tech Easier:
Click here to read the rest of my MTE articles.
iCloud Apple ID – When Taking a Call Through Your Computer is Just Too Cool!
By Nick Iandolo
This one is all about the power of Apple ID published on LinkedIn Pulse. Not only are there useful tips in the article but a few infographics and images that I created to help the reader (you can see one of them on my Custom Graphics page under Infographics).
Managing your Emails: Email Software or Cloud?
By Nick Iandolo
This article was also published on LinkedIn Pulse.
I think there’s a lot of good info in this article—especially the advice of using an email address of a dedicated professional (i.e. non “GMail,” etc.) domain name (like nick@tenthsphere.com). Nothing says amateur than using a generic email address/domain name!
Note: The reason why these LinkedIn Pulse articles are links from the images and not directly hosted PDFs like the articles above is because I know that my LinkedIn Pulse articles will be there as long as I am on LinkedIn, so I don’t have to worry about these examples suddenly becoming unavailable like parts of the Quebec City article above. If anything changes with that, I’ll post hosted versions here.
Trade and Industry Publishing
New Uses of ePassports: Automated Border Crossing and Beyond
Ghostwritten by Nick Iandolo
Sometime shortly after I started working for Viisage/L-1 Identity Solutions, my writing abilities were quickly recognized and utilized by the Director of Marketing, the Director of Sales, and the VP of Sales at the time: Marty Dugan, Jeremy Kirsch, and Jenny Openshaw respectively. All have gone on to become high-level execs of some outstanding companies in the the technology industry (Jenny is now SVP of Sales and Sales Operations, of what L-1 ultimately evolved into, IDEMIA).
During that time (ca. 2007-2008) I was given the wonderful opportunity to ghostwrite and article for Smart Card News (a British identity technologies publication). I have the original drafts to prove that I actually wrote it.
The following article that I wrote was on the exciting new uses for ePassports—especially as it pertained to border security—much more effective than building a feckless $26B wall if you ask me!
This document is an excerpt from the publication that features my article (pps. 14-16)—see the link below to view the entire magazine.
Click here to view the entire archived publication online from June 2007.