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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Newspapers don’t own journalism

I always thought it was odd to hear flat out declarations that there can be no life on other planets in the absence of water. How egocentric! So you’re saying that life can only exist if it’s precisely like us?
Really?
That’s the feeling I’m getting right now in the woe-is-us, hand-wringing sob-fest about whether life and [...]

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Students, Denver and the Fifth Estate

I’m in Denver today with a group of University of Nevada, Las Vegas students who are kind enough to call me their teacher. Fellow-learner is more like it.
Once again, we’re experimenting with the future of journalism — using the latest tools in different ways to help people get news and better connect with information, events [...]

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See no AP, speak no AP, link no AP

I kept telling myself I was way too busy to compose a long, thoughtful piece about AP’s supremely boneheaded, wrongheaded, counterproductive and just plain stupid move to threaten to sue bloggers who quote and link to AP stories but don’t pay AP.
But I am never, ever too busy to vote.
So please count my vote in [...]

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Visualizing Twitter

New Twitter applications just keep getting more and more fun, but they are tough to keep track of.
Here’s a delightful and encompassing post from Flowing Data on 17 Ways to Visualize the Twitter Universe.
(Call me crazy, but it reminds me of “Visualize Whirled Peas.” )
The blog’s author, Nathan Yau, says he is a UCLA [...]

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Billion dollar bye bye

I come from the “follow-the-money” school of journalism, so I’ve written about more than my share of billions over the years. But Alan Mutter took my breath away with his post cataloging the staggering volume of dollars that have fled newspaper help wanted, or so-called “recruitment” ads.
Newspapers have lost more than half of their print [...]

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Saul Alinsky would be proud

The students and I talked current events today in my Web Publishing and Design class, and the chit chat wasn’t about the Super Bowl or Super Duper Tuesday. It was about Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo and what that could mean for all of us.
One among them knew that Google’s CEO reportedly called Yahoo’s CEO to [...]

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Fried squirrel, politics and the media

Some followup notes from my delightful conversation this morning on KNPR’s State of Nevada, with host Dave Berns and his panel of so-called “witty academics.” (The audio with David Damore, Ken Fernandez and me from University of Nevada, Las Vegas and Eric Herzik of University of Nevada, Reno, is here.)
During the show, I mentioned a [...]

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Faster than the Pony Express

Thanks to the printing press, the mail coach and the steam packet—gifts beyond the gifts of fairies—we can all see and hear what each other are doing, and do and read the same things nearly at the same time.
— Maria Edgeworth, (1767-1849) Irish author
(thanks to Ted Pease and his alert WORDster Louise Montgomery)
 

So “The [...]

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Selling the free stuff for $14.99

Chile pepper recipe bookOriginally uploaded by charlotteanne.lucas
What if you give away the polished and edited content, but then put a price tag on the user-generated content?
People will buy it.
Those of us who have solicited so-called user-generated content know that there’s just about nothing more popular than people’s own stuff.
The numbers are overwhelming and [...]

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