As part of a Philadelphia magazine issue on the ‘Millenial’ generation, I was interviewed in a Center City coffee shop by Nick Vadala, the bright, bearded and 20-something magazine contributor who was a former intern of mine at Technically Philly.
He was asking me about trends in our generation’s employment goals, and I found myself saying that we seemed defined (and work) by three themes, which made it into his nut graf but isn’t online yet so I wanted to share here.
If journalism is going to evolve to a savvier appreciation for ‘impact,’ its makers need to have a clearer idea of their target audience.
Like you would for any business, you need to know how big your market is, and you need to understand how hard (and necessary) it is to create that audience by acquiring new users — in this case, civic-minded residents.
Continue reading How many ‘civic-minded’ residents do you really have?
I work at a startup. Not a tech startup or, to be honest, according to some, any kind of startup at all. I help lead a growing, young, small media business that happens to cover technology companies and startup culture, so I’m around conversations about definitions a lot.
Let me be clear: in this post, I’m using the definition I use for ‘startup,’ meaning a young company testing a business model. I’m writing here about what type of person I’m finding can work best in such an environment, which is different (but neither better, nor worse) than a large corporation or even another smaller, but more stable and more clearly defined, organization.
The Geek’s Guide to Dating is a new cheeky, self-help style instructional book for finding the right person from my friend and frequent collaborator Eric Smith.
Read my review of the book here.
Continue reading Geek’s Guide to Dating: I was in a playful romance self-help guide web series
For much of the 20th century, the newspaper industry had this curious role filled by “rewrite men” — though, of course, women, too, served these positions. For breaking on-the-scene news, when telegraphs and then faxes couldn’t do the trick, a reporter would get on the phone with a rewrite man and assemble a story live, using notes and standard formatting.
The reporter would speak his story — an impressive feat, actually, having heard a few veterans do this and often trying it to keep up the old tradition — and the rewrite man would record it, transcribe it, clean it up and run it. If you talk to a newspaper reporter of a certain age, she might have stories about the good rewrite men and bad rewrite men. The good ones would take your rough story and turn it into a gem (with the help of other editors too). A rewrite man might go years without ever seeing his byline in a newspaper, never getting any official acknowledgement of his work to put out a finished piece of copy.
Continue reading A note of thanks to all the editors of the world
Today is the most accessible moment in the history if mankind. We are new enough with tools that they are still used personally by many leaders but advanced enough that adoption is rampant.
Continue reading This is the most accessible moment in history
Search engines are familiar territory, but I picked up a few lessons from the workshops that followed the panel I was on during the Google for Media event that preceded the Online News Association conference in Atlanta.
I’m sharing what I picked up here, as much for me as for you.
Define the mission underpinning the work of your news organization, and then allow yourself to experiment with new and potentially better ways of telling stories.
That’s my interest in finding new innovative storytelling methods, and so I was excited by the chance to share examples with nearly 100 reporters and educators who visited a session I cohosted during a national news innovation conference in Atlanta last week.
Know why you’re doing your coverage and find the method that best creates that outcome. While that may mean a beautiful, highly produced product like the Serengeti Lion web interactive from National Geographic, depicted above, my focus here is sharing low-cost or free ideas for inspiration.
Continue reading Innovative News Storytelling: 5 ways and dozens of examples
Before the full Online News Association conference kicked off in Atlanta, I was on a panel discussion about lessons from local reporting online during an event Google held for members of the media.
I was joined by Joaquin Alvarado from the Center for Investigative Reporting, Thomas Wheatley from Atlanta’s Creative Loafing and Bryan Leavoy from WSB-TV and the moderator Daniel Sieberg from Google.
Continue reading 5 things I told Google about innovative local reporting online
The design was led by Tom Rose and we partnered on the WordPress development (WordPress multisite) with WebDev Studios. We’re still making our way through bugs and looking toward a second phase, but I’m proud enough of a few design elements that I want to share.
My colleague Brian Kirk and I put no less than a year of thought into the effort, so we offered considerable direction and then watched Tom and WebDev exceed in making those plans a reality. Read a more general assessment of the redesign on our company blog here, and find a recap of our old site here.
Below, find some small elements that I’m most proud of and think should inform your design work.
Continue reading Design elements you should steal from our Technical.ly redesign
