Just a quick programming note:
If you’ve ever seen me in person, perhaps giving a short presentation and talking about journalism, blogs, social media, innovation at newspapers, or my own projects, you can now find related notes, slides, and links on my Speaking page.
I’ll keep that updated.
Previously[...]Last week, the Yankees won the World Series.
You may not know this about me, but I, yes, I am a fan of baseball’s New York Yankees.
After weeks of Paying Attention To Baseball, which I haven’t done with any real passion or regularity since Game 3 of the 2004 ALCS, [...]
I’ve been through most of this before, either in blog posts or in person, whenever I get the chance to talk with journalism students, but it’s worth repeating. A few tweets this week seem to have proved that, so I’m putting this updated compendium of my advice together for [...]
Given: Dan Gillmor famously stated (and I’m paraphrasing from memory): “My readers know more than I do.”
I like to take it an order of magnitude up into the branches of the tree, along these lines: “The diaspora of information (having been set free by the Web, mostly) knows infinitely more [...]
Remember when I went to graduate school at San Jose State University to get an M.S. in Mass Communications?
Well, I finished. Here’s the proof, which arrived in the mail a few days ago:
PreviouslySometimes, I show up [...]Well, it’s been a pretty awesome week.
I spent most of last Thursday through Sunday at the 2009 Online News Association conference in San Francisco, and if you follow me on Twitter or spotted a short post on my blog over the weekend, you know that Publish2, my current employer, was [...]
At the Online Journalism Awards banquet this Saturday, Publish2 had the honor of receiving the first Gannett Foundation Award For Technical Innovation in the Service of Digital Journalism.
Here’s our big thank you to all the journalists that made our success possible.
PreviouslyONA09 debrief and [...]Right here, right now, I’m going to give you a great idea, for free. Enter it in the Knight News Challenge (deadline: Oct. 15), or perhaps more likely, the Community Information Needs challenge (next year). Or fund it yourself. Or bootstrap it. Or pitch it to a local [...]
Scott Karp (yes, he’s my boss over at the office) is more fascinated than I am about Google’s new FastFlip, but he’s wisely focusing on the fact that it’s an experiment with a new user experience for online news, and not implying that it’s something poised to Save [...]
Over at the Knight News Challenge blog, I’ve contributed a short list of tips on dealing with developers and choosing a platform for your project:
“3. Hire human beings, not a programming language or Web framework. Unless you’re doing the programming yourself, stay focused on your end goal and steer [...]
I’ve been a nomad for a few days in the middle of a short-by-my-standards 300+ mile move from the suburbs of Rochester, NY to the suburbs of Washington D.C. and boy are my legs tired.
But I’m catching up on my reading, and found a few things to share with you [...]
I’ve been meaning to write about Mark “10,000 Words” Luckie’s “How Twitter saved my career… and my life” post since he wrote it, but haven’t had a chance yet. If you want a good idea of what publishing an excellent blog and maintaining a presence in social media channels [...]
I’ve been saying those words in person to people a lot lately:
“There is no newspapers.”
What’s it mean?
It means that if you’re in the business of publishing pronouncements, predictions, prayers, analysis, criticism, or full on takedowns related to the current state of the newspaper industry, please understand that despite the convenience [...]
I’ve been saying those words in person to people a lot lately:
“There is no newspapers.”
What’s it mean?
It means that if you’re in the business of publishing pronouncements, predictions, prayers, analysis, criticism, or full on takedowns related to the current state of the newspaper industry, please understand that despite the convenience [...]
Remember when I said I might never blog again?
Well, I’ve got a couple topics in mind, namely these two nuggets:
There is no newspapers. The link economy is real, and it’s coming, and you’re going to love it.But I don’t have time to elaborate right now. Instead, enjoy the clues flowing freely, [...]
In January 2008, Howard Owens, Zac Echola, and I launched a social network with self-motivated, eager-to-learn reporters, editors, executives, students and faculty in mind.
Wired Journalists was born with the mission of connecting the knowledgeable, expert innovators in online news with journalists of all stripes hoping to learn [...]
In January 2008, Howard Owens, Zac Echola, and I launched a social network with self-motivated, eager-to-learn reporters, editors, executives, students and faculty in mind.
Wired Journalists was born with the mission of connecting the knowledgeable, expert innovators in online news with journalists of all stripes hoping to learn [...]
…one department head or another asked the 140 freshman wanna-be Spielbergs/Godards/Raimis* in the room to raise their hand if they wanted to be a Director.
Many, including me, raised our hands.
The faculty response: “You’ll be lucky if four of you make it.” (I’m paraphrasing. This happened in 1994.)
When I talk to [...]
…because I’m having so much fun with the Publish2 WordPress plugin…
A roundup of things I found interesting so far this week:
Obama And Helen Thomas Celebrate Their Birthdays
UpTakeVideo | August 6, 2009
Can’t believe she didn’t get a question in about health care reform while she had [...]
I feel like this summer has been sort of a rolling watershed moment in the Present of News, if not necessarily the Future of it.
(Yes, yes, the lowercase present is always becoming the lowercase future, but I’m talking about the supposed collective vision for the Future of News that, well, [...]
Over at IdeaLab, I’m continuing a conversation I started on Twitter a couple weeks ago that spilled over here as well.
Do you call them a community?
Better yet, what makes an [...]
When I met David Weinberger in person last month at his Harvard talk with Doc Searls and Jonathan Zittrain about Cluetrain, I told him something along the lines of “I’ve been enjoying your blog for as long as I’ve been reading blogs.” And that’s true. I’ve been reading Weinberger, [...]
A bulleted list of things that have caught my eye over the past few days, or things I’ve been involved in, or things I’d like to be involved in…
Pat Thornton interviewed me for the BeatBlogging podcast. We talked about ReportingOn, what it could become, and (more important) what it [...]Over at IdeaLab, I’ve got a post up that circles back to the first version of ReportingOn, my Knight News Challenge project. In the post, I revisit some of the problems the 2.0 release was intended to solve, and I do a bit of scorekeeping on RO’s progress.
Here’s a [...]
I’ll be doing the Poynter live chat thing at 1pm EDT today over there.
Please, show up, ask some questions, share some success stories, and add to the conversation.
[UPDATE: Wow, that was awesome. Thanks to everyone who showed up, and to Ellyn, Mallary, and everyone else at Poynter for hosting [...]
I asked my Twitter followers what they think of substituting the word “community” for “readers” and I’m getting lots of good responses, many of them negative.
Either I didn’t know “community” had much of a stigma, or I spent too long working with “community” newspapers to notice. Back then, it [...]
ReportingOn 2.0 is live and ready for your questions. And answers.
It’s still the backchannel for your beat, but it’s an absolute re-imagining of the network.
For those of you who haven’t been keeping score, ReportingOn is a project funded by the Knight News Challenge, and it’s a place for [...]
A few days ago at the annual APSE convention, I led two sessions on Networked Journalism. On the way down to Pittsburgh from Rochester in the car, I tried to work out an idea I’ve been playing with for a while.
Authenticity.
Not authority, or reliability, or popularity, but a more [...]
Over at IdeaLab, I’ve interviewed Baghdad Brian, who I met in October 2007 at the first Networked Journalism summit Jeff Jarvis threw at CUNY. At the time, Brian was raising money to keep Alive in Baghdad going, and we did everything but pass a hat around the room [...]
What follows is intended as a brief personal braindump from the four days I spent in Cambridge, Ma. last week, most of it deeply entrenched in the guts of #KNCMIT, a conference hosted by the MIT Center for Future Civic Media featuring Knight News Challenge winners from 2007-2009, and the [...]
Last week, I asked for some on tips on why news organizations should link to external sources.
I wanted your best reasons, and you happily provided them. Six of you answered via the Publish Tip Form I embedded in that blog post, and seven of you replied on Twitter.
You [...]
I’ll be showing up in person in at least two different places outside the lush springtime confines of Western New York over the next few weeks, believe it or not.
The rough detailsNext week, I’ll be in Cambridge, Ma. at MIT for the Future of News and Civic Media Conference, [...]
Over at IdeaLab, I’ve been way past deadline for a post, after (again) making all sorts of promises about helping out more over there. Until now.
After playing the modern equivalent of phone tag (Twitter DMs and e-mail across two operating systems and one ocean) for a week or so, [...]
Hey RSS readers, click on through to answer the question if you don’t mind. Trying to gather some ideas for a post I’m working on. Thank you!
Previously
Are your readers a community?
Why [...]
[UPDATE: Predictably, this was the wrong day to bring this up.]
I get the feeling people think of MediaNews* CEO (and AP chairman) Dean Singleton as some sort of billionaire boogeyman, the last guy in the world you’d want buying your news organization, but his take on why newspapers [...]
Inspired by recent discussion about the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New York Times guidelines for reporters using social media.
[...]
Things you may have noticed about me in recent days, weeks, months, or years:
I don’t write blog posts as often as I used to. I share links all over the place, and I have for a long time now. I have a new job that involves a lot of thinking about best [...]I am extremely excited to let you know that I’m starting a new job on Monday, as Director of News Innovation at Publish2. I’ll be working for Scott Karp, who I’ve been following since I started blogging back in 2005, and with a team of top-notch [...]
For those of you keeping score, I started blogging, more or less, when I started graduate school at San Jose State University back in early 2005.
As of Monday, April 6, 2009, I’m finished with my M.S. in Mass Communications at SJSU’s School of Journalism & Mass Communications, after turning [...]
Over at the PBS IdeaLab blog, where I write about the development of ReportingOn, my Knight News Challenge project, I just posted something that starts to get into what Phase 2 of the “back channel for your beat” is going to look like.
Well, not what it’s going [...]
Over at the PBS IdeaLab blog, I interviewed Michele Ellson, editor and publisher at The Island, a local news site devoted to covering the city of Alameda, which sits to the west of Oakland in San Francisco Bay. (Yes, it’s an island.)
Michele left newspapers in 2007 and launched [...]
So the wife and I were watching Bourne Ultimatum this weekend on DVD.
(Yes, yes, I know, a few of you still know me as the former film student who was inspired to make movies because I knew I could do better than Lethal Weapon 2, but I still like [...]
Yesterday, news broke that Hearst will close the San Francisco Chronicle if it a) can’t dramatically reduce costs (read as: cut payroll in half) or b) find a buyer (it won’t).
Analysis:
Alan Mutter Mark Potts Ken DoctorAlthough it is likely that you will hear and see a copious amount [...]
A lot of talk about platforms for news these days, no?
A sampling:
Joey Baker at CoPress defines one of the many things that “newspaper platform” could mean to a local news site:
“…taking lessons from Gawker, Slashdot and the New York Times, and aggregating everything. If there’s a story online that’s [...]
As you may or may not have heard by now, my boss at the office, Howard Owens, has moved on.
I just want to take a moment to publicly say thanks to Howard here, and more than obviously, to wish him the best in whatever endeavor other people might [...]
Sean Blanda hit me up today for a quick attendee interview for BCNIPhilly — that’s BarCamp NewsInnovation for the uninitiated, and you should show up to tell everyone about that cool project you’ve been busting your butt on for the last N days, weeks, or months.
Here’s the tough [...]
I am very specifically not enjoying the current wave of handwringing over whether or not some version of micropayments, online subscription, or paywalls could work for typical U.S. news organizations.
But here’s Clay Shirky:
“The essential thing to understand about small payments is that users don’t like being nickel-and-dimed. We have [...]
Carlos Virgen rounds up some thoughts on wiki use by news organizations, but I always get the feeling that most reporters and editors stop reading at the word “wikitorial,” freak out, and hide under the desks.
Still here?
Good. Carlos has a great idea about using a wiki as a “contextual [...]
As is my habit, I’m running behind on my Carnival of Journalism post this month, set to the timely and tuneful whistles and bangs of talk about whether a newspaper’s online revenue could support the newsroom, how long the newspaper of record will keep the press running, and what [...]
Over at IdeaLab, Rich Gordon shares his exit interview with Brian Boyer and Ryan Mark, the first two programmers to earn a Master’s degree through Medill’s Knight News Challenge-funded scholarship.
Because it’s fucking important.Thanks to the News Challenge, I’ve had the chance to meet Brian and Ryan and hang [...]
I spotted a tweet today from Steve Sloan that reminded me there was some sort of awesome road trip going on, wherein San Jose State student journalists are on their way to the inauguration by way of the South, reporting on landmark events in the civil rights movement.
Their [...]
The most striking conclusion I’ve come to based on the results of the commenting survey that 49 online news folks answered over the last week or two was this:
Commenting on news stories is still broken. Busted. Stinks. It’s a mudpit. Still.
I’ve been writing about how to improve commenting [...]
From Daniel Victor comes news that he’s working on a new job description, and a new reporting beat:
“If I can sell my editors on the concept, I would be the author and community manager of a new blog. My stated goal will be to have at least one originally [...]
Bryan Murley announces the CICM internship program:
“The pitch: How would you like to learn new media skills while having a positive impact on the college media environment? Join us for a semester of new media opportunity as the first intern for the Center for Innovation in College Media for [...]
For a couple years now, I’ve been working with editors, reporters, and commenters on news sites taking the following hypothesis as a given:
Commenters will be the most civil in the place that is the most public.
For example, I expected commenters on news stories, where more people could see their words, [...]
[Some time ago, I wrote a series of posts that attempted to address some of the revenue-related issues facing traditional news organizations and suggested some possible solutions to making incremental (and larger) changes that might help them stay profitable. For no good reason, I'm going to carry on the [...]
Behind the scenes at Wired Journalists, a few of us have been talking for some time about the need for an all-encompassing database of online tools for news, featuring tutorials, examples, ratings, and reviews.
Chris Amico has made a solid run at building out the guts of it, launching [...]
I spent 20 minutes or so talking about Wired Journalists and Ning with Pat Thornton last week for a BeatBlogging.org podcast.
Here are some highlights from Pat’s list of questions:
From Suzanne Yada’s resolutions for journalism students in 2009, this bullet point:
“Grow some cojones.
Let me level with you. The world doesn’t need more music reviewers or opinion spouters. The world needs more people willing to ask tough questions. The first step to reversing journalism’s tarnished image is to [...]
I have a little theory.
It’s my opinion that commenters — or anyone, really — is the most civil when they’re speaking in public and everyone can see who they are.
So, I think that news site commenters/readers are most civil on news story comments, then blog posts, then message board threads. [...]
Jon Marshall’s News Gems blog at SPJ.org has been a quiet, consistent resource, chronicling high-quality reporting for more than three years.
Marshall is moving on to other endeavors:
“As we reach the end of 2008, I wish I could say that things have gotten easier for journalists. Of course they haven’t. [...]
For those of you unfamiliar with my personal and professional timeline, I worked at the Santa Cruz Sentinel from October 2006 through the end of September 2007, first in a position accurately titled Webmaster, and later as the Online Editor, working in a mostly bright, young newsroom in downtown [...]
First, a bit of history: The first time I fiddled with a newspaper Web site, it was thespartandaily.com, after I walked into an adviser’s office at San Jose State’s School of Journalism & Mass Communications and asked something like “hey, any way to get an RSS feed off that [...]
Howard “yes, he’s my boss” Owens follows up on the December 2007 post that spawned Wired Journalists with an update as the year grinds to a burly, overwhelming close. (Well, it’s been that way the last couple weeks for me, at least.)
Howard asks how wired you’ve become in [...]
For this month’s Carnival of Journalism, Dave Cohn is asking for positive (if possible) predictions for the new media world of 2009.
How about 5?A massive new report from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University takes on some of the most important questions about change in the world of journalism — and to be more precise, change in the world of information distribution, consumption, and participation.
I talked with [...]
I’ve been whittling away at this at random hours in between 642 other small projects, so feel free to click through and have a look at my handiwork.
Major goals of this minor redesign included:
First, two items for the glossary so I can make sorted references to mixed berries in this post:
Will you be there?
Previously
Over at IdeaLab, I’ve posted an update on what’s going on with ReportingOn, which is to say, there’s not much going on with ReportingOn. For now.
My Knight News Challenge-funded project to connect journalists on the same topical beat with their peers launched on October 1. I continued development [...]
I came back to an office in the suburbs of Chicago yesterday from a lunch with colleagues to the news that The Tribune Company had filed for bankruptcy. (A journalist told me. Pretty sure it was the NYTimes Dealbook blog I spotted on her screen.)
Thoughts:
If you’re anything like me, you’re not really a Web developer by trade, but you push around a little bit of code on an extremely regular basis. And often, it’s the same little bits of code over and over again. And every time you need to use it, you go [...]
One of the original visions for Wired Journalists was that the “already-wired” would write tutorials about new media, new tools, and getting around the busier corners of the Web, for the benefit of the “non-wired” and everyone in the community.
It’s happened in fits and starts, [...]
I was struck by a few things in Howard Weaver’s post announcing that he’s leaving McClatchy — and journalism — at the end of the year.
For one thing, Howard’s a damn fine writer.
I haven’t agreed with everything he’s said or done as I’ve followed his blog for the last [...]
Three links about Twitter you should see if you haven’t yet:
TechMeme adds a human editor to make adjustments when the algorithm fails:
“Any competent developer who tries to automate the selection of news headlines will inevitably discover that this approach always comes up a bit short. Automation does indeed bring a lot to the table — humans can’t possibly discover [...]
Jason Kristufek is proposing the details for a set of regional BarCamps to get “smart, cool, tech-savvy media industry folks together in an environment that doesn’t acknowledge rules or boundaries to help solve problems and create best practices.”
This grew out of reaction to the recent closed-door API newspaper executive [...]
Without much preamble, I highly recommend you enter Publish2’s “Are you the future of journalism?” contest, wherein you can WIN A JOB.
Considering how many journalists lost their jobs today, and how many likely will lose their jobs tomorrow, and how many have lost their jobs this year, I’m [...]
Mark Potts on what it takes to shift a news organization’s focus from print to Web:
“How many newspapers have a sizable staff responsible for managing print circulation? All of them of course. Now, how many have even one staff member responsible for managing online distribution via RSS, e-mail or [...]
Everything we use is free and open-source. Our platform is Ruby on Rails backed by Mysql databases running on Ubuntu servers. The cost here isn’t software, or even [...]
The moment that launched years of overzealous information consumption, filtering, sharing, and engagement, for me, was seeing Scoble’s feedreader on a screen in 2005. He was subscribed to 1200 feeds.
Since then, he’s shifted his information production and consumption around from stream to stream as necessary to stay at the [...]
A few things I haven’t had time yet to dig deeper on, but maybe you will:
“4. Go off the reservation: No matter how good your IT department is, [...]
Jason Kristufek has opened up a wiki for BarCamp / NewsInnovation:
“The idea is to get energetic, tech-savvy, open-minded individuals who embrace the chaos in the media industry because the ability to do really cool things still exist. We also need find those people outside of our industry who [...]
Over at IdeaLab, an IM interview with Jason Preston of Eat Sleep Publish about a series of events he’s organizing called “The Pitch.”
The premise? Put together some of the smartest, most engaged, passionate thinkers about the changing media landscape in a room, buy them a few drinks, and [...]
Pretty much every single industry that involves convincing consumers that your product, or idea, or business is a great idea has been strafed with a raft of “What [Your Industry Here] Can Learn From Barack Obama” blog posts lately, and journalism is no exception.
This month’s Carnival of Journalism, which I’m [...]
Over at Signal vs. Noise, Jason Fried explains “why the Drudge Report is one of the best designed sites on the Web.”
“The Drudge Report usually leads with a “font size=+7” ALL CAPS headline in Arial. Sometimes it’s italicized. Sometimes, for something big big, he’ll cap it off with [...]
From a New York Times story on VoiceOfSanDiego.org and other onlne-only local news organizations doing original reporting and investigative journalism:
The people who run the local news sites see themselves as one future among many, and they have a complex relationship with traditional media. The say that the deterioration [...]
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo on plans for 2009:
“So January will usher in a new Democratic Ascendancy in Washington. And here at TPM we believe we are uniquely qualified to chronicle it. So to that end we are hiring two new reporter-bloggers to be based in Washington, DC, [...]
The TypePad Journalist Bailout Program:
Recently bought out, laid off, or otherwise relieved of your daily newspapering duties? SixApart’s TypePad blog service is offering a free account that usualy costs money, advertising services, and promotion at Blogs.com.
“Your blog can act as a clip file for your best pieces, whether [...]
Know what Foo Camp is? Know what BarCamp is?
OK, now that we have that out of the way, Jason Kristufek is calling for a “summit” of future-of-news hotshots/thinkers as a counterpoint to the recent American Press Institute mostly-executives meeting of the minds.
Sounds like a BarCamp to me. [...]
Chris Anderson takes notes on the Long Tail at a Sergey Brin talk that turns to participation and scale. It turns out, Brin through no one would show up to populate Wikipedia with articles:
“But he was wrong, he says, because he–even he!–had underestimated the way scale can change the [...]
Daniel Sato is one of a circle of photojournalists I met at San Jose State University while I was spending a lot of time there working on my (still-but-not-for-long) unfinished graduate degree.
Now that whole crew has spread out from the Bay Area across the country and in at least two [...]
The Orange County Register is aggregating tweets about fires in the area right now.
This is advanced reporting with Twitter, jumping way ahead from using it as a tool to push out headlines, and serving a very different information need than the promotional / community building [...]
I’m trying to get into the habit of posting a few medium-length items over at IdeaLab every week. here’s a start:
Stack Overflow Sets an Example for News Commenting Systems
The premise? Stack Overflow, a new-ish site for programmers to answer each other’s questions, has a [...]
Check out the redesigned Placeblogger a 2007 Knight News Challenge winner.
The aggregation-by-location niche seems to be blowing up lately, especially as startups try to hitch their maps to the iPhone’s wagon, but Placeblogger feels like real live humans are writing blog posts in real [...]
Why We Should Feel Bullish For the Future of Journalism:
“Go ahead. Go get lost on the web for 20 minutes, find a journalism startup you like and email the founder to let them know you support what you are doing. You’d be surprised how much that means to them [...]
