Small Initiatives

A long time ago someone said to me: "When the parent becomes threatened by the child, the stage is set for a Greek tragedy." If reports are to be believed, that's playing out right now in San Diego,...

Jay Rosen points to a thought-provoking speech in which Clay Shirky likens American television to a gin bender that unfortunately has lasted half a century. All those hours wasted on mind-numbing...

Now that Vin Crosbie's year of teaching at Syracuse is drawing to a close, he's talking about what he found in about a quarter of the faculty: "They're obstructionists because they either deny things...

Back in the early 1800s a young French writer wrote some observations on the character of American society that I think have something to tell us about how journalists and newspapers should use the...

Via Martin Stabe, who should be in your RSS reader: Bridgestone (aren't they a tire and rubber company?) has somehow given birth to an unholy abomination that combines many of the shortcomings of a...

There's just no way to think about the future and get it right. The other night we were all watching "Back to the Future, Part 2" for about the 900th time. I got a chuckle out of the "Surf Vietnam"...

Back in 1994 when I was recruiting a design director for Star Tribune Online, I got a blizzard of applications from artgeeks from as far away as Australia arguing that if I really believed in the new...

B (Baltimore Sun) launched last week and a bunch of new Examiner sites in the process of launching in cities where the Examiner doesn't (yet?) publish in print. They share a webby characteristic...

Morris DigitalWorks is looking for a first-rate Web designer to join its award-winning Web development team. This is a design job that requires an understanding of usability principles, site...

If the world unfolded as predicted by Bill Gates, printed newspapers would be dead in the next four years. While he may turn out to have been directionally correct and merely wrong about the timing,...

I've left unpublished a bunch of comments lately that seem to reflect a new kind of spam. Since Google's algorithm is known to value inbound links, many of the spam comments that get posted on the...

The other day in an email to a friend I referred to "the economic tsunami that seems headed for the U.S. newspaper industry." Is that overstated? If you recently lost your job in a newsroom cutback,...

At the risk of once again being told that I hate America, I'm compelled to cite Neil McIntosh's observation that the United States has an ugly characteristic in common with a certain African country:...

In the print-only "Darts and Laurels" feature of Columbia Journalism Review for March/April, there's a "laurel to Charlie Gibson and ABC for hosting the best debates of the nominating season -- so...

It's traditional in journalism for everyone to talk at the beginning of an election cycle about how they're not going to descend into horse-race journalism and, instead, focus on meaningful,...

In my PublishAsia presentation in Macau I walked through a general business case for social networking as an integrated feature of a news website. The argument goes like this: We have an audience...

I'm back in the online world after two weeks in which I was not completely offline, but nearly so. I spoke and moderated a session at the Ifra PublishAsia conference in Macao, toured Bangkok's...

Here's another example of how the Internet has shifted power from institutions, and how that can be a good thing. While the Internet certainly has empowered whispering campaigns and hate bloggers, it...