What brought all this about?

I thought this was a bogus story when I first heard about it, and can’t believe The New York Times made such a big deal about it over the weekend: President Obama’s all-guys hoops games, and what that might say about the true influence and “place” for women in his administration: “Women are Obama’s base, [...]

The key ingredient for the new news emporium

Mathew Ingram, an online news evangelist at the Globe and Mail in Toronto, admits that the printed word still has something over the Web that may not be changing anytime soon: “I realize that there is far more content — from a vast diversity of sources — available on the web than there is in [...]

Silencing the voice of an institution

Allow me to be parochial here, at the risk of getting overly sentimental. I’m coming late to this topic because I’ve been out of town on business the last few days. One of the giants of the sportswriting tribe has retired. A lot of them have been doing that in recent years with newspaper buyouts [...]

Taking a deep breath, and the long view

I came across Kurt Andersen’s “Reset” at the bookstore the other day. After sifting through polemical, shock-inducing titles that heave on current affairs shelves — “Catastrophe,” “Arguing With Idiots,” “Whores” and “Shut Up, America!” — I luxuriated in deeply humane reflections about making sense of the economic recession, as well as the profound cultural and [...]

Twitter goes down, the world Tweets anyway

While waiting for my social media crack supply to be replenished today, I found out I’m hardly alone in my Twitter cravings. The problem, in a nutshell: It was possible to post and the search function worked, but timelines weren’t available. And quite a few people, myself included, were down to 0 followers and were [...]

Some tough lessons about journalism startups

I write here quite a bit about my general bullishness regarding journalism startups and other experiments that I do believe will pave the way for successfully doing the news online. But Alan Mutter reminds us of two ventures involving former Rocky Mountain News journalists that were non-starters because of misunderstood assumptions about their work, and [...]

Caught in the pinch of health care reform

Read (and listen to) this former newspaper journalist’s account of trying to nail down adequate, affordable health insurance for her family as a freelance writer and editor, and keep in mind that she used to cover this issue for the Chicago Tribune: “I understood how health insurance worked, or at least I thought I did. [...]

Journalistic minds shouldn’t think alike

A few links I’m finding helpful as I begin a critical week for a media startup project that’s soon to bear fruit. More details on that later; for now, some good reads about journalism, media and work, and the importance of shedding old ideas and ways of working that just don’t cut it any more: [...]

As the neutering of the newsroom continues . . .

It’s been so easy to whip up on the Washington Post for its new social media policy imposed in the wake of a top editor revealing political opinions on a protected Twitter account (since closed). Certainly it could be a teaching moment for a once-great newsroom that, like so many others, has been reduced to [...]