Crowdsourcing my mom’s cancer

My mom has always been our clan’s chief information hunter and learner.
That is, until last week, when she was diagnosed with a rare cancer: Waldenstrom’s macroglobulinemia.
Mom was a medical research librarian – someone who delighted in being a generous resource for journalists like me.
I remember her describing the day in 1981 or 1982 when a [...]

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The Twitters tell the story

I was asked to be the wrap-up Rapporteur for the 10th International Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin last week.
The conference had the Twitter hashtag #isoj, and, partly because it is Webcast live, people were watching and Twittering about it in real time on at least four continents. (Here is [...]

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Twitter 101

What is Twitter?
It is like a microblog, a place to say your piece, or Tweet, in 140 characters or less.
And it is a place to listen.
Unlike my soapbox of a blog, my Twitter home page is actually a waterfall of other people’s words, blended in a real time river from streams around the world. They [...]

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Call out the posse — the Twitter posse

J.D. Lasica has a very interesting post here from a session at the Aspen Institute and San Francisco State University’s Roundtable on Mobile Media and Civic Engagement.
He poses the notion of a “posse” of collaborators who could use Twitter to send questions to a reporter who is covering a news event. It sounds like a [...]

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Students out to save the news biz

Here’s the reason for my slow posts this past couple weeks, as I and other faculty herded  students from seven universities to the Online News Association conference in Toronto to present youthful and innovative visions for the future of news.
First, a video of students from each of the three projects from MediaGiraffe.
I’m a little partial [...]

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