Invisible Inkling

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

All About inspiration

Culture shock

April 12, 2008 – 10:27 pm

Trying to turn the tide of the decline of newspapers from the inside involves a great deal of evangelizing and pontificating and running through sets of common scenarios with folks who are still firmly planted in the Paper business rather than the News business.
That’s no surprise.
And it’s no surprise that top-down, do-it-this-way mandates don’t work [...]

Links that redefine news

February 19, 2008 – 12:24 pm

Wednesday night, I’ll be speaking with Steve Sloan’s New Media class at San Jose State University.
I’m planning to show off some of the best of your work.
Yes, you.
I’m looking for online news sites and projects that stray from the traditional definition of news.
I’m assuming these journalism students get enough Gloom & Doom handwringers from other [...]

Introducing WiredJournalists.com

January 22, 2008 – 10:07 am

At the end of 2007, Howard Owens* published a blog post outlining a year-long program he called 2008 objectives for today’s non-wired journalist.
A few of the objectives:

Become a blogger.
Start shooting your own pictures.
Do the same with video.
Join social networks.

Howard soon started fielding e-mails and requests for guidance from reporters looking to take him up on [...]

Imagination is everywhere

March 26, 2007 – 7:12 am

Scott Karp says part of the problem with the newspaper business has been its lack of imagination:
“Nobody imagined that somebody would be so recklessly uncapitalistic as to create a website where people could post classified ads for free. Nobody imagined that an online software company specializing in information retrieval, but which produced no information of [...]