Invisible Inkling

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

All About undead-reporters

A vote for change…

January 4, 2008 – 8:51 pm

We talk a lot in the circles I run in about a new skillset for reporters and about how a wired journalist in 2008 should be keeping up with the technologies and communities that are quickly looking like Michael Johnson in 1996, looking back at newspapers over their shoulder, smugly.
Yoni Greenbaum walks right into the [...]

Five ways to produce online news without asking the web guy for help

October 7, 2007 – 6:07 am

You don’t know what it’s like for the web guy at a newspaper.
All day long, requests and ideas funnel in his direction, with no end in sight, and little help.
Web guys, this is for you.
Reporters, listen up. Here are five ways you can put together something wonderful for the web without asking the web [...]

If you don’t get unbundled media, you’re not selling attention*

September 30, 2007 – 8:57 pm

Command-and-control, top-down, masthead mass media is dead.
Seriously.
It’s over, and the readers/users/viewers won.
And without getting all “Information wants to be free,” I’ll just say that if you don’t get what Howard** and Zac are talking about here, it’s time for you to start understanding it.
Take Howard’s advice, young journalists:
“Blogs should be a daily routine for every [...]

The messy beginnings of an online portfolio

September 14, 2007 – 7:25 am

It’s not organized as well as I’d like, and it’s neither finished nor comprehensive, but if you can’t help but be interested in the sort of stories I wrote as a reporter (way back in 2006, mind you), there are now a few clips from the Spartan Daily and Oakland Tribune posted on my Work [...]

Halloween debriefing

November 1, 2006 – 9:44 am

With all this talk about the Death of Newspapers going on and on and on, I started thinking, “What about the undead reporters?”

Best interview of the night?
Dick Cheney: He kept saying “It was a hunting accident, I swear.”
Then he pointed the plastic shotgun at me.
Video of all the chaos and skin that is Downtown [...]