Invisible Inkling

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

All About writing

Seven notes, six links

November 1, 2007 – 9:51 pm

Hypothesis:
Dooce is (still) one of the best things on the Interweb.
Plea:
Jay Rosen has the beatblogging with a social network thing worked up pretty clearly at this point, but if the project doesn’t leave behind tools (a WordPress theme, a Drupal module, a useful set of forms — something more tangible than good ideas that [...]

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 [...]

The eleventh obvious thing: Your subscribers are dying

July 16, 2007 – 6:44 am

Here’s a newsroom exercise sure to drive a stake of fear squarely into the heart of your circulation manager:
Count the number of obituaries printed in your paper in the last year for local residents over the age of 60.
Now compare that number to your paper’s drop in circulation over the same period.
If you see a [...]

Virginia Tech

April 18, 2007 – 9:18 pm

I don’t think there is going to be a Why in this story.
There’s certainly a What Happened, and as journalists, that’s our first job.
The remaining details will fill themselves in over time, but the Why will probably never come.
Everyone will blame what they want to blame — no, what it is convenient for them to [...]

Pleasure reading, fiction and otherwise

April 3, 2007 – 6:58 am

In an effort to take a break from instructional books of all species for at least a portion of the day, I’ve picked up a couple lighter reads this week.
First, there’s Pete Dexter’s Paper Trails. This just barely counts as ‘not work’ since he’s a newspaper columnist and I heard about the book at [...]