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Ryan Sholin

Category: Media

  • Find a way, any way, to cover breaking news

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    Ryan Sholin
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    Howard Owens spent his Saturday migrating a small weekly newspaper site from one content management system to another. On a Saturday? Why? Because the town the paper covers was the one in Kansas that was almost completely destroyed by tornadoes. It’s called Greensburg and the paper is the Kiowa County Signal. Along with most of…

  • Another wonderful West Coast event I’m regretfully unable to attend – but you should

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    Ryan Sholin
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    I promise, at some point next Fall, I will emerge from the land of the bisy backsons and start showing up for some of the really cool conferences and summits and conventions that the cool kids put together. But for now, I’ll continue learning (and schmoozing) vicariously through those of you lucky enough to make…

  • The easy route to online newspaper transparency

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    Ryan Sholin
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    Joe Murphy offers newspapers five ways to be a little less opaque online. Basic things like disclosing conflicts of interest are easy enough, archiving corrections online can be more difficult, but my favorite element on this list, of course is #2, in which the Editor blogs: “Start an editor’s blog, or ombudsman blog, or some…

  • How to interview a reluctant A-list blogger

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    Ryan Sholin
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    [UPDATE: Dave Winer points out some bits of sloppiness in my reporting here. I’ll update this post shortly. Revisions in italics.] The “I won’t do a phone interview” meme made the rounds again this week, via a Wired reporter’s mission to get quotes from Dave Winer and Jason Calacanis on TechCrunch blogger Mike Arrington. Jason…

  • What’s your online newsroom’s emergency plan?

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    Ryan Sholin
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    Roanoke has been doing everything right online on the Virginia Tech story. Breaking news, multimedia, everything at once, plus, the one thing most of us never think too much about, keeping the servers running. Here’s how they did it. I hate to ask this question, but what’s your online emergency plan in the event of…

  • A few Long Tail basics for newspapers

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    Ryan Sholin
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    Every now and then I have one of those moments where I look at a newspaper or something someone’s written about them, and I remember – “Wait a minute, these guys are still trying to talk to everybody at once.” It’s puzzling to me, and yet, it happens all the time. So here are a…

  • What I’ve been working on all week

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    Ryan Sholin
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    I’ve been working with a reporter for the last couple months to help him put together a set of multimedia projects to run with his centerpiece in today’s paper. Here’s the proverbial fruits of our labor: two audio slideshows, a video, and a podcast, all complementing his print stories by taking us behind the numbers…

  • Virginia Tech

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    Ryan Sholin
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    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…

  • Basic training: The right tool for the right desk

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    Ryan Sholin
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    I don’t care if you write for a tabloid, college paper, local placeblog, niche site, major metro, community newsletter, alt weekly, or the New York Times — What’s the one thing you wish your news site had more of?

  • Mixing the traditional and the postmodern in online news

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    Ryan Sholin
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    I love the idea of Digg-like profiles for readers. “What I’m reading” pages and “What I commented on” lists should be essential to a newspaper’s social network. Also, building audio and video comments into a newspaper site would be frigging awesome.