Ryan Sholin

Category: Media

  • What your news organization can learn from the Crunchberry project

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    Ryan Sholin
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    First, two items for the glossary so I can make sorted references to mixed berries in this post: Crunchberry.org = The virtual home of the Medill J-School’s Knight News Challenge grantee programmer/journalists. Newsmixer.us = The demo of the community conversation application the Crunchberry team built for the Cedar Rapids Gazette, a newspaper in Iowa which…

  • BarCamp NewsInnovation – Philadelphia

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    Ryan Sholin
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    Will you be there?

  • Thoughts on the Tribune bankruptcy

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    Ryan Sholin
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    I came back to an office in the suburbs of Chicago yesterday from a lunch with colleagues to the news that The Tribune Company had filed for bankruptcy.  (A journalist told me. Pretty sure it was the NYTimes Dealbook blog I spotted on her screen.) Thoughts: This has little to do with Sam Zell’s abrasive…

  • New at Wired Journalists: WJ Tutorials

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    Ryan Sholin
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    One of the original visions for Wired Journalists was that the “already-wired” would write tutorials about new media, new tools, and getting around the busier corners of the Web, for the benefit of the “non-wired” and everyone in the community. It’s happened in fits and starts, but Pat Thornton of BeatBlogging.org is taking on a…

  • Howard Weaver’s exit interview

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    Ryan Sholin
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    I was struck by a few things in Howard Weaver’s post announcing that he’s leaving McClatchy — and journalism — at the end of the year. For one thing, Howard’s a damn fine writer. I haven’t agreed with everything he’s said or done as I’ve followed his blog for the last couple years, but I…

  • BarCamp NewsInnovation update: Regional in January, NYC in April

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    Ryan Sholin
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    Jason Kristufek is proposing the details for a set of regional BarCamps to get “smart, cool, tech-savvy media industry folks together in an environment that doesn’t acknowledge rules or boundaries to help solve problems and create best practices.” This grew out of reaction to the recent closed-door API newspaper executive meeting, where, as best as…

  • You are the future of journalism. Aren’t you?

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    Ryan Sholin
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    Without much preamble, I highly recommend you enter Publish2’s “Are you the future of journalism?” contest, wherein you can WIN A JOB. Considering how many journalists lost their jobs today, and how many likely will lose their jobs tomorrow, and how many have lost their jobs this year, I’m betting there’s a pretty big pool…

  • Dear Blogosphere, There’s more to newspapers than The New York Times

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    Ryan Sholin
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    I’ve been holding back on this for a long time, and I write enough about the Web development team at nytimes.com enough to be held to this as well, but really, I’m incredibly tired of reading media and technology bloggers debate the future of news as if the only existing newspaper in the world is…

  • Notes on getting serious about staffing for online news

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    Ryan Sholin
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    Mark Potts on what it takes to shift a news organization’s focus from print to Web: “How many newspapers have a sizable staff responsible for managing print circulation? All of them of course. Now, how many have even one staff member responsible for managing online distribution via RSS, e-mail or Facebook? Damn few. How many…

  • Technology is easy; labor is hard

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    Ryan Sholin
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    Aron Pilhofer of nytimes.com on the hardware, software, and costs associated with building the best interactive data projects in the news business: Everything we use is free and open-source. Our platform is Ruby on Rails backed by Mysql databases running on Ubuntu servers. The cost here isn’t software, or even hardware, which is relatively cheap…