Admit it: You’ve had the startup daydreams. They really kick in when you read that Company X just secured millions of dollars from a venture capital firm (for what seems like a pretty ordinary idea). “If I had millions of dollars,” the little voice in your head says, “I’d hit this one out of the [...]
How does one balance the ethics and values of being a journalist with the demands of personality and transparency required by social media? That was the question we tackled last week at an ONA Seattle panel discussion titled “You are what you tweet.” It was run in conjunction with the #wjchat weekly series run by [...]
By Jake Batsell When I landed my first full-time reporting gig at The Seattle Times in the 1990s, the Times was still an afternoon paper. A big part of my entry-level GA job was chasing stories that already had appeared in the competition, the morning Post-Intelligencer. Many of my mornings began with an uneasy scan [...]
By Jake Batsell Landing a plum newsroom job straight out of college has never been an easy feat. But this year’s journalism graduates face a double-barreled challenge: an unusually stingy job market and a growing perception that their generation has a “lax work ethic,” as a Washington Post headline declared last week. The Post’s story [...]
By Matt Neznanski There’s a lot of hope for newspapers in capturing some of the emerging (exploding?) mobile market in the coming months and years as phones get smarter and people begin to rely on them more and more for information. But despite the best of intentions, most small newsrooms aren’t prepared to go mobile [...]
By Jake Batsell When a high-profile trial hits town, today’s Web readers expect real-time coverage. But what does that mean for the courts reporter who also has to absorb, interpret and report the fine points of the case? Last week in my Digital Journalism class, I led a Columbia University case study examining the Bakersfield [...]
Mark Briggs 
Posted in Practical advice 
Tags: beat reporting, court reporting, liveblogging 
1 Comment » I want to thank everyone for the great feedback following yesterday’s doubleheader of webinar and live chat at Poynter (and Howard and Ellyn for inviting me). There were too many questions to answer and many of them focused on local implications and opportunities regarding social media. So following up on the discussion, let me offer [...]
By Matt Neznanski Newsroom activists have to do a lot of arm-waving and hand-holding to get reporters to try new ways to tell stories. Sure, newsroom culture and fear have sunk many a well-intentioned multimedia package and most organizations still make online fight for a place at the assignment desk. But sometimes the big hurdle [...]
By Rick Martin Starting a website and convincing users to participate can be difficult. People can only visit a handful of websites in their daily browsing, so if your website isn’t one of them why not allow them to contribute from the places that they prefer to go? That could be their own blog, or [...]
Editor’s Note: Today’s guest writer is Pierce Presley, self-proclaimed “Emperor of the Pierce Presley Web Empire,” and a newspaper guy frantically trying to learn new media skills. You can follow him on Twitter at @piercepresley. By Pierce Presley I’m in the final semester of my masters program, and I’m working on a capstone professional project [...]
