Journalism is a strategy, not an industry. More verb than noun.
I’ve written for years now about what I called “Journalism Thinking,” and so I cxontinue to collect examples of what I consider acts of journalism produced outside of news organizations. Consider this a place for me to gather these examples for future use.
Continue reading Examples of journalism strategy outside news organizationsThis will be the last year of my 30s.
Might as well send this decade of my life out with a flourish. One way I do that is with my annual resolutions, setting goals and a direction for where I want to get.
Below, I share them for my own reference.
Continue reading My Resolutions for 2025I closed last year having felt that I set a new normal I hoped to continue in 2024. I was right.
I traveled a bit more, spoke a bit more, wrote a bit more, all while feeling more comfortable as a parent and a bit more certain where my company had to go. Plenty of vulnerabilities remain but I feel more comfortable in my life post-pandemic and post-kid. I am blessed, if challenged.
Below I share the highlights.
Continue reading My 2024 in reviewAn old editor told me once: always pick up the phone, but never apologize until you mean it.
As a beat reporter, you’re going to get feedback from sources—sometimes praise, often critique. That’s a good thing. Sometimes we’re wrong, and hearing feedback helps us correct the record. Our goal is to get it right. But sometimes, the anger directed at reporters isn’t about errors or issues that require action. It’s about emotions, misunderstandings, or disagreements.
Continue reading Beat reporters: How to respond to an angry community sourceIt’s not that gender doesn’t matter. It does. The point is that people experience gender differently than others, and that recognition is next in a long journey of social progress.
Intellectuals, academics and activists in gender theory are not of uniform opinion but many discuss “co-construction” today, in which gender is a product of both culture and biological sex. The language is nuanced, and the politics are heated. That’s no reason to not push forward.
That’s from the new book “Who’s Afraid of Gender?” from Judith Butler, the feminist philosopher and gender studies scholar. As an undergrad, I read “Gender Trouble,” the 1990 book Butler wrote when they were just 34 years old, and which popularized many concepts developing within gender studies. This book is about gender generally, though trans identity is a focus.
Continue reading Who’s afraid of gender?Initially set in 1992, later editions of the science fiction classic “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” updated the setting to 2021. And so, we have now lived through Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel.
Perhaps best known as inspiring the 1982 Harrison Ford movie Bladerunner, the novel won mixed reviews at launch but has developed a cult following. Dick (1928-1982) is not remembered as a great writer as much as a great thinker (Minority Report and Total Recall also inspired by his stories), and that’s felt truer still after a new wave of artificial intelligence hype.
The title plays off a subplot of the book in which the humans who remain on earth (after nuclear fallout) covet the status symbol of a living animal, as opposed to artificial ones. So, the question is whether androids (the increasingly human-passing machines that the main character is chasing) would dream of electric ones? Its big theme: What defines humanity, especially if machines increasingly recreate many of the skills we identify with? I enjoyed the book, and below share notes for my own future reference.
Continue reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?We were back. Audience was great, I enjoyed my lunchtime keynote interview with Wired editor Steven Levy.
To fill an early-morning slot, I crowdsourced a session (in old school unconference style!) on creators as distribution partners, and creators of news. (The topic has been on my mind!) In a crowded room
Below are a few notes from the daylong unconference on the future of news for my own memory.
Continue reading A few lessons from the 15th annual Klein News Innovation CampThe creator economy may be big, or not. The numbers are somewhat divided because definitions are still evolving.
I took what I did know from covering, living and curating creator campaigns, and gave a keynote on the topic for the Philly Ad Club’s annual conference. They had roughly 150 marketers on site at the cozy innovation space of Independence Blue Cross’s headquarters.
Find my slides here. A rough audio recording of the presentation can be found here (or here).
I published here a piece on Technical.ly informed by this work.
By 2100, the dead could outnumber the living on Facebook, and other social platforms like it.
Centuries of hiding the dead away may come to a close as our “digital remains” may keep our ancestors around us at all times. We ought to have a plan.
So argues the Oxford researcher Carl Öhman in his new book The Afterlife of Data: What Happens to Your Information When You Die and Why You Should Care.”
The book is a mix of philosophy, technology and information sciences. It’s rich, light, short and important. I recommend it. Below I share my notes for future reference.
Continue reading What happens to our digital remains after we die?Backed by a research project on tech workforce development that I am leading with Technical.ly for our client Accenture, I got the chance to share high-level findings.
Ahead of National Apprenticeship Week, I gave a 10-minute talk, which was broadly about apprenticeships but included a bit of general tech workforce and tech economy basics and some Philadelphia-specific detail. Find the slides here, and a story I wrote on the topic here.
