Invisible Inkling

Ryan Sholin on the future of newspapers, online news and journalism education.

All About Media

October Carnival of Journalism: How to move the needle in your newsroom today

October 18, 2008 – 9:39 pm

Journerdist-In-Chief Will Sullivan hosts this month’s resurgent Carnival of Journalism, asking the following:
“What are small, incremental steps one can make to fuel change in their media organization?”
I’ve mentioned some incremental steps you take to grow a little revenue at a time recently, and there’s a list of free or cheap tools for online news sitting [...]

Newspapers: Vanishing faster than you think

September 29, 2008 – 11:24 am

Philip Meyer, author of The Vanishing Newspaper, in AJR:
“The town crier’s audience was limited to the number of people who could be assembled within the range of an unamplified human voice. Printing changed everything. It made the size of the audience theoretically limitless and, by the creation of multiple records, enabled more reliable preservation of [...]

Cross-pollinate or shrivel

September 19, 2008 – 4:01 pm

I’m profoundly enthralled by things like rapid news-driven development in Django, and building a CMS that can switch from a beautiful feature layout to a Drudge-like breaking news linkbomb on a dime, and of course, leveraging the steady stream of free embeddable tools showing up online every day for your own newsy purposes.
But none of [...]

On IdeaLab: Can the political press grow a spine with a little help from you?

September 15, 2008 – 4:53 pm

I interviewed Jay Rosen today on IM about his spinewatch project, which encourages journalists, bloggers, and citizens in general to point out moments when the political press on the campaign trail shows evidence of needing to grow one, or of having grown one.
Jay:
“But the rules and assumptions underlying the fact checking regime are vulnerable to [...]

Check out my online news toolbox

September 8, 2008 – 10:26 am

I finally finished a basic Tools page to start a list of some of the basic, mostly-free, mostly-embeddable applications that I recommend for quick and simple Web production.
It’s not intended to be all-encompassing; it’s just a short list of things I find useful.  You might find them useful, too.
But if you have any suggestions for [...]