Social media in the 16th century

We all know there is a lot of irrational, ungracious, and even deeply prejudiced ranting on the internet. The tone of civil discourse is widely acknowledged to be deteriorating. Take this anti-Catholic screed I recently found on the internet: Now we drive out the pope 
from Christ’s church and God’s house. 
 Therein he has [...]

Engineering Journalism

Re-Engineering Journalism « Knight Garage. 20 visions of the future of journalism, brief talks by the 2011 Knight Journalism Fellows.

Rethinking the Christian college communication curriculum

Technical expertise is everywhere. Good judgment is not.

Blogging as Scholarship

Blogging. For many, the term evokes thoughts of cringe-worthy diary-esque posts by angry teenagers, or bland breakfast tweets by bored acquaintances. But in many fields, including the sciences, law and librarianship, blogging has become vital to the advancement of scholarship. Blogs provide outlets for scholarly exchanges and expression of ideas that might otherwise be lost [...]

The future of media? Bet on events

Robin Sloan, on generation vs recitation. Lots to think about. A specter is haunt­ing the inter­net, and I think it’s even scarier than the chal­lenge of get­ting peo­ple to pay money. It’s the chal­lenge of get­ting them to pay atten­tion. I think it’s only going to get worse—which is to say, bet­ter, because we as [...]

The reason social media is so difficult for most organizations

Seth’s Blog: The reason social media is so difficult for most organizations. The answer is simple enough to surprise you.

the price of Twitter

Over at the New Yorker, George Packer has an interesting and important essay about social media and its effects on culture, particularly the news. “Any journalist who cheerleads uncritically for Twitter is essentially asking for his own destruction,” he says. I’m not sure he’s right about that, but there are lots of hidden costs we [...]

The career path spiral

Al Kauffman and I recently presented a workshop on the job search strategies, focused on the idea that you aren’t looking for your next job, you are actually looking for the job after that. Here is the presentation

three fathers

Part of a guest lecture in our intro to communication course. The topic was writing as career and vocation. This is the last eight minutes of the video, looking at the influence of their fathers on three writers: Zinsser, Leax and me.

writing as vocation

[The following essay was excerpted from a presentation on "Writing as Vocation" at the student media convention sponsored by College Media Advisers in Spring 09, New York City. See related presentation here.] Why do you write? Whatever your answers, they tend to break out along two dimensions: the esthetic and the persuasive. On the esthetic [...]

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