In honor of the passing of Steve Jobs, I was trolling through videos of the Apple co-founder. I came across one that was very relevant to the news industry today. More than a year ago, Steve Jobs spoke about the iPad and Apple’s broad role in touching publishing and journalism, during a broader interview at [...]

Sometimes, if not most times, what happens outside of the sessions can be what’s most valuable about a conference. I learned plenty the traditional way at the 2011 Online News Association national conference, held in Boston this weekend Sept. 22-25, but I surely got more out of reconnecting with friends and colleagues from other markets, [...]

Academic Clay Shirky tossed down another great post ahead of an undergraduate course he’s teaching at NYU. In the end, he calls for more chaos — more competitive approaches to creating meaning news for citizens, beyond news for consumers. You ought to read the whole piece, but here are a couple of my favorite parts: [...]

Almost two years later, I read the entire Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age, the report of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities. Debuted in September 2009, I tackled the 80-page document for “the Hardly. Strictly. Young conference I attended in April at the University of Missouri, which was dedicated [...]

A friend recently told me that everyone should have at least one good analogy every few months. He’s already heard my Journalism needs a catering business spiel, in which I suggest meaningful, public affairs reporting needs to be an audience or reputation grower for something more profitable. That is, if journalism is the low yield [...]

Creating a bold and serious collaborative niche membership network with existing and emerging independent media should be a primary objective of WHYY, the Delaware Valley public media organization. Highlighted by its six-month-old NewsWorks online news site and hyperlocal news experiment, WHYY has attempted to recast itself as something more than a stodgy PBS TV channel [...]

Do news organizations have responsibility for their outcome? That became the final and, I think, as yet unanswered close to a discussion I led during the final session of the third national BarCamp NewsInnovation, held Saturday April 30 at Temple University and rounding out the inaugural Philly Tech Week. [See past BCNI write ups here.] [...]

Data, context and engagement were the themes of the Hardly. Strictly. Young. event at the University of Missouri Reynolds Journalism Institute this week, says Michael Maness, the Knight Foundation Vice President of Journalism and Media Innovation. Also read a Columbia Journalism Review overview from fellow attendee, new friend and total asshole Craig Silverman, who takes [...]

Late at a bar in my neighborhood, a friend asked me: how are you innovative? His general assessment was that Technically Media, a consultancy, and Technically Philly, a news site, weren’t particularly innovative or interesting for 2011. We’re an online-based startup of 20-somethings creating journalism-fueled content. That might barley bass for envelope-pushing in the late [...]

Print is going to last longer than we might think because we can prove print in a way we cannot prove with digital. Someone recently mentioned to me that in 10 years, we’ll still be predicting the death of newspapers. I think sitting here, in my office, looking at a copy of the Wall Street [...]