Meditations on the future of news video
Not too long ago I was packing up my life in Houston, Tx, shoving everything I owned into my car for a trip west. In between buying packing tape and paper cuts my mind was bombarded with ideas for improving newspaper video. One of those ideas resonated enough with the judges of the Knight-Mozilla News...
The Million Dollar Road Show
My latest endeavor, a show about finding homegrown entrepreneurs along America’s roadways, kicked off nearly a month ago in Chicago. For the last couple weeks I’ve been traveling cross country in an Airstream with a pair of brothers and producing a documentary travel show about finding homegrown heroes along America’s roadways. Right now we have...
Six ways to get more followers on Twitter
Personal branding and social media seems to be all the rage in our self-indulgent, opinionated, fly-by-the-seat modern lives. It’s the new self proclaimed SEO guru and just from my own experience searching LinkedIn, there’s been a 50% increase in users claiming social media as a skill over last year, on the business social site. That’s...
Did you hear the one about the guy #JCarn
Once again, welcome to my latest post for #JCarn. The Carnival of Journalism is a loose collection of journalism thinkers (and people like me) who get together to post on their blogs with their reflections on a given prompt. This month head carny David Cohn prompts: Epic Fails. What’s your biggest one? If you’d like...
Delicious Saved from Sunset by YouTube Founders
A couple of months ago the future of social bookmarking pioneer Delicious (or Del.icio.us for you purist) looked bleak. Today, the service was sold to YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen for an undisclosed sum. The pair will fold it into their new company, AVOS. News of Delicious’ shut down broke famously on the...
Things never to say to a photojournalist
Designer Ron Reason, and old Poynter friend, recently posted an item on his blog about things never to say to a photojournalist. Ron and PJ Jedi Kenny Irby, in an effort to gain/earn more respect in newsrooms for editorial designers, artists, and photographers, decided to have a little fun and started asking friends and colleagues...
Mythbusted: re35 digital “film” won’t bring back your F2
Sad but true. The “OMG I’m not a gear head but I want this gadget” that we all lusted after last week was indeed, too good to be true. I ignored the numerous grammar and spelling errors. The site was well thought out and slick and shouldn’t have had them, but I viewed them as...
Knight News Challenge 2.0 #JCarn
Welcome to the first of what I hope will be many posts as I participate in #JCarn. The Carnival of Journalism is a loose collection of journalism thinkers (and people like me) who get together to post on their blogs with their reflections on a given prompt. This month head carny David Cohn prompts: the...
Why the NTYs pay wall is a good thing, but won’t work
If you’re a news junkie, use Twitter or have somehow landed on this website, you’ve no doubt already heard about the New York Times pay wall finally coming online. Months of planing, fixing glitches around the clock to the last hour and at a cost of nearly $40 million to $50 million. Publishers and media...
Press start to read
Today’s post is half of a “great fake debate” on the prompt of “Books are still important or have tablets have replaced books making them obsolete?” With tongue firmly in check, I argued that tablets are overrated. Be sure to click the link though to the website to see the opposing viewpoint and vote for...
Bones and kids
A couple of you saw me tweet this today and were curious about what I was up to. “Walking around in the woods w/ boy scouts showing me where they found the dead body. Now I’ve nvr seen Stand by Me, but I imagine it’s this” Well it turns out a group of friends were...
Birds on a wire
San Antonio seems to be under some flight path for many migrating animals. Last spring there were tons of grackles, I’d never seen them before but they look like something between a raven and a crow, and some of them are pretty mean to as you’ll see in this video. A couple months ago we...
