Newstex Blog

Whether you’re an influencer or an academic, having a solid online persona is essential. It’s the lens through which your readers will view your work, and just as you wouldn’t show up to a job interview in cutoff shorts and a t-shirt with a dirty joke, you also don’t want your online persona to undermine your credibility. My colleague Jason wrote an article on the subject last month, but today we’re going to look at some specific tips to help you perfect your online persona, including the use of curated pieces of content and the promotion of thought leadership.


In Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, the protagonists visit a monastery with a fabled library that’s reputed to have one of the best collections of books in all of Christendom. However, access to the books is strictly controlled. The library consists of a labyrinth of 56 different rooms. The tomes within are organized according to a complex system based on verses from the Book of Revelation, and the librarian and his assistant are the only ones with the knowledge to navigate it. Even if an outsider managed to sneak inside the library, they’d struggle to find anything specific. Moreover, the library is even rigged with traps to further disorient intruders. Searching the Internet can feel a bit like trying to navigate Eco’s labyrinth, and it can be easy to get waylaid on your quest for knowledge. Today, we’re going to talk about how to find knowledge effectively. This article is the first part of a larger series that aims to help creators level up their content through digital literacy.

The other day, I happened to be taking a virtual stroll through the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and I was struck by a statue of the Egyptian pharaoh Horemheb that was carved before he ascended the throne. At the time of its creation in the 14th century BCE, Horemheb, (whose name can also be transliterated as ‘Haremhab’) was a high-ranking military officer, but you’d never guess that from looking at the statue. We might expect to see him depicted as a warrior with weapons at the ready; instead, he’s depicted as a scribe sitting cross-legged on the ground with a papyrus scroll laid across the front of his linen kilt.

