TweetESPN hit a double with its investigation of alleged sign-stealing by the Toronto Blue Jays. A little bit of crowdsourcing could now drive it home. A short summary of the investigation: ESPN talked to four visiting players who claimed to see a man relaying information about upcoming pitches to Blue Jays batters, which is a …
How crowdsourcing could aid ESPN’s sign-stealing investigation Read More »
TweetJuly 4 in Philadelphia offered us a solid case study on the proper place of Twitter in reporting. Word of a shooting at a crowded Center City fireworks show spread rapidly through Twitter, and some people are disappointed that local media did not report on it. I’m about as big of a Twitter fan as …
TweetONA Philly’s first happy hour 6 p.m. Wednesday, June 29 Triumph Brewing Company 117 Chestnut Street RSVP here There are a lot of great online journalists in Philadelphia, but we aren’t talking to each other as much as we should be. Let’s change that. Enter the Online News Association, a national organization that claims over …
Introducing the Philly chapter of the Online News Association Read More »
TweetCommunity is the vehicle, not the destination. Action is the destination. Any output beneath that may be fun, but it’s not what we should be shooting for. It’s a necessary distinction because you may think your work is done once you build a vibrant community, if ever you’re so lucky. For too long I’ve fallen …
If community is the vehicle, action is the destination Read More »
Tweet (Thanks to Bryan Calabro at The Wilkes Beacon for the video) I was lucky to speak to high school journalists this morning as part of the 2011 Tom Bigler High School Journalism Conference at Wilkes University. Its theme was the “future of journalism,” so I aimed to show that there really are a lot of …
Telling high school students there really is hope in journalism Read More »
Tweet…it wasn’t getting dates. I swear it. It really was about infusing reader contributions into the reporting process. The idea started as a feature that would land on Valentine’s Day about single life in D.C, complete with bells and whistles and whosits and whatsits. I’d conduct a month’s worth of interviews, so this thing was …
My true motivation behind a month-long series about dating Read More »
TweetThe big buzz today was on Quora, a question-and-answer website that’s getting all the requisite “It’s going to replace Twitter/blogs/unsliced bread” hype. As with any bit of Mashable-fueled hysteria, it’s worth examining to see not what you can do here, but what you can’t do as well anywhere else. That said, it appears on first …
Quora for journalists: Daydreaming on its potential Read More »
Tweet It was almost 6 p.m. when we discovered in the newsroom that Andrew Stack, the pilot who attacked the IRS building in Austin, was a graduate of the Milton Hershey School, right in our backyard. For my first 2.5 years at The Patriot-News I covered the residential school for underprivileged children, so I offered …
Facebook delivers interviews for breaking, after-hours story Read More »
TweetWhen you’re the only reporter in the newsroom on a Sunday night, you have to be ready to write any kind of story — even if you have no prior sourcing on it whatsoever. I know how to reach the police chief, but what happens when you need to do a political story, you can’t …
Tweet When I had an internship at The Wichita (Kan.) Eagle, my life was turned upside down: Jeopardy was on at 6:00 p.m., and Wheel of Fortune was on at 6:30 p.m. Back home in Pennsylvania it was the other way around: Wheel of Fortune was on first, then Jeopardy. They were the same two …
An opportunity for smaller news organizations to show digital leadership Read More »