# Ryan Sholin

> Still here, every now and then.


## Posts

- [Pivot to Sustainability ✅](https://ryansholin.com/2025/03/28/pivot-to-sustainability-%e2%9c%85/): In my post about the Next Right Thing last week, I buried the lede that I start a new job on April 1, so I’ll get the important information up high in this post… Starting Tuesday, I’m the Advocacy Lead for Electricity Maps. I’ll be focused on building partnerships, relationships, and business, mostly in the United States. Electricity Maps is leading data-driven decarbonization by providing an enterprise-grade API to customers including Google, Samsung, and Cisco, with information about the carbon intensity and mix of energy sources available at any particular time, anywhere in the world. You can use the free […]
- [The next right thing](https://ryansholin.com/2025/03/23/the-next-right-thing/): Those of you who have followed my pivot to sustainability in recent months know that I’ve been focused on how I can help slow down climate change in the area where I have the most expertise and experience, working with the software that powers the Internet. Estimates of the size of the problem vary. Most public presentations about green software kick off with a statement and accompanying data visualization explaining that “data centers” or “the internet” or “software and hardware” account for one to four percent of global carbon emissions, roughly the same as global aviation. It’s a good way […]
- [February 2025: The view from here](https://ryansholin.com/2025/03/04/february-2025-the-view-from-here/): If January was the longest month since March 2020, February was 28 consecutive days of chasing twin toddlers around someone else’s fancy house while they have full diapers that need changing, except they are also somehow armed with blowtorches, and 49% of the people in the house are cheering them on while their own hair smolders, but also every day, the toddlers get to kick two more people out of the house, and they boot the firefighters first. Sorry. That might’ve been traumatic for parents, and especially for parents of twins or other multiples, and, to be fair, for my […]
- [WordPress without Automattic](https://ryansholin.com/2025/03/03/wordpress-without-automattic/): Nope, this is not a thinkpiece about the future of the WordPress ecosystem, it’s my notes on migrating this website off of WordPress-dot-com and setting aside other Automattic products where possible. This website has moved! I mean, it’s still at the same URL, so you probably haven’t noticed much, but since I left Automattic, I’ve been managing a rolling migration as I move all my personal and professional and family business and various other websites off WordPress-dot-com hosting, away from Jetpack, and as much as possible, to run healthy, performant, and secure WordPress sites using open source software and paid […]
- [January 2025: A month that happened](https://ryansholin.com/2025/02/03/january-2025-a-month-that-happened/): Four months into my move into climate tech, the last 11 days of January lasted about a year, and were not the best days, but we beat on, boats against the current, borne forward ceaselessly into the future, to interpolate Fitzgerald. Highlights Predictions: I published my 2025 sustainability predictions on LinkedIn, my personal blog, and Overt Impact. Spoiler: I published the last of them on Friday January 17, and a couple of them started aging poorly after the new U.S. president was sworn in on Monday January 20. Publishing a bunch of LinkedIn posts is of course the best way […]
- [Climate predictions for 2025](https://ryansholin.com/2025/01/17/climate-predictions-for-2025/): This week on LinkedIn, I’ve been publishing my 2025 predictions about key trends to expect in corporate sustainability and the intersection of climate tech, energy, and data centers. I wrapped them all up in one post over at Overt Impact, and you should at least click that link to feast your eyes on the not-subtle Hitchhiker’s Guide reference in the obviously AI-generated image that illustrates the piece, which I won’t reproduce here in full. What I will do here is provide a summary of that professional sounding post with a slightly warmer, more personal series of takes below. I promise […]
- [December 2024, an account of the ongoing campaign](https://ryansholin.com/2025/01/02/december-2024-an-account-of-the-ongoing-campaign/): Three months into my pivot to sustainability, I’ve successfully narrowed the focus of my conversations, job applications, certifications, and publications.  All that and a bag of (GPU) chips below… What’s next for me: An ask for you: Do you know anyone else who pivoted to sustainability from some mix of tech or media? Connect us, if they’re willing and interested! Previously: November 2024, milestones and activities
- [November 2024, milestones and activities](https://ryansholin.com/2024/12/02/november-2024-milestones-and-activities/): Two months into a transitional period on the way to my goal of working full-time in sustainability, I’ve been keeping busy with calls, reading, research, and other projects. Selected milestones and activities during November 2024, by the numbers: What’s next for me:Finishing some reading, taking a Green Software Practitioner course to see how much I’ve learned, and continuing to get familiar with the wide range of open-source green software projects out there. A question for you: What’s the best book you read this year? I just started Dilla Time, Braiding Sweetgrass, and The Grid.  (Email is a fine way to answer, […]
- [Technological Determinism and Manifest Destiny](https://ryansholin.com/2024/11/16/technological-determinism-and-manifest-destiny/): I still find myself running into conversations where people are skeptical about the use cases, benefits, and wisdom of using Generative AI. I don’t think this is a case where we can ignore a technology (kudos to you if you completely sat out Web3 NFTs), but I find myself thinking about the assumption that AI is coming, no matter what… The Marketplace of Ideas, Crashed In the mid-2000s, as blogs rose to prominence, I was an absolutist about free speech and a true believer in the Marketplace of Ideas. Social media followed, and I set aside my concerns about its […]
- [Introducing Overt Impact](https://ryansholin.com/2024/11/07/introducing-overt-impact/): tl;dr: I’m launching my consulting business today to help big companies answer big questions about Sustainability, AI, and WordPress Architecture. Throughout my career, I’ve built experience and expertise on a wide range of topics all centered around content and marketing technology on the web. In many cases, I’ve developed well-informed strong opinions on certain topics, and in other cases, I’ve learned that execution eats well-informed opinions for breakfast, and the reality is that “it depends” is a perfectly valid answer to many questions about technology — until you learn enough about a customer, website, company, or concept to understand what […]
- [What I'm Reading, Early November 2024](https://ryansholin.com/2024/11/04/what-im-reading-early-november-2024/): Sometimes, you just need to go through your many, many open tabs and find the good stuff. And then share it. You do share the good stuff, right? Here are three things I’m reading and a useful tool.
- [October 2024, by the numbers](https://ryansholin.com/2024/11/01/october-2024-by-the-numbers/): Yesterday was four weeks since my last day at Automattic, and I’ve been keeping busy.  Selected Activities since October 3, 2024, by the numbers: What’s next for me:Registering an LLC, grabbing a domain, and opening a bank account to get set up for a consulting business. A question for you: If you’ve done consulting work, how did you land your first customer? (Email is a fine way to answer, unless you want to leave a public comment on this post or the LinkedIn version.)
- [How to be a natural at sales](https://ryansholin.com/2024/10/25/how-to-be-a-natural-at-sales/): 💡Something struck me while I was listening to this excellent 20VC podcast from Harry Stebbings with AJ Tennant (from Glean, ex-Slack, ex-Meta): Their points on how and when to build different sales functions and verticals were right on, and I wish everyone I worked with in 2018-2019 knew then what AJ Tennant knows now.  (Everyone I worked with in 2018-2019 in sales should listen to that podcast. Or build a time machine. First one, then the other.) But! There was one (almost throwaway) binary argument they touched on and thankfully didn’t dwell on too much. ❓ Are great salespeople born […]
- [Frequently Asked Questions about Enterprise WordPress](https://ryansholin.com/2024/10/18/frequently-asked-questions-about-enterprise-wordpress/): One interesting thing about leaving a job and looking for a new job and reconnecting with old colleagues from other companies and talking to new people when networking is that you end up talking about the job you just left quite a bit to explain what you’ve been doing for the past seven years. I’m definitely not out of practice talking about Enterprise WordPress, so this is all rather fresh in my mind, but just the same, I thought I would write down some handy talking points for myself, written in the way I’ve been talking about them for a […]
- [What I learned last week](https://ryansholin.com/2024/10/14/what-i-learned-last-week/): Oh, I guess that title sounds a little too dramatic, maybe? As if it’s about some big thing that happened? No, I just want to log some of what I’m learning on this break between day jobs. Linked, in. My “professional news” post on LinkedIn from Oct. 4 has done some numbers: 15,000+ views as of today. LinkedIn is my professional social media channel now. It was only a couple years ago that I viewed LinkedIn influencers with a great deal of skepticism, one line at a time, pithy inspirational cliches, etc. That’s… changed? Somewhat. Although I do deeply enjoy […]
- [15 reasons I'm working on sustainability](https://ryansholin.com/2024/10/09/15-reasons-im-working-on-sustainability/)
- [What I'm Hearing; How I'm Learning](https://ryansholin.com/2024/10/08/what-im-hearing-how-im-learning/): Back in the dark ages of Web 2.0, I worked at a startup called Publish2, where we gave bloggers (mostly journalists) tools to curate links and publish them in the sidebar of their blogs. “What I’m Reading” became the easy-to-understand shorthand title for these handy widgets, and this was interesting right up to the point that Twitter took over the intersection of journalists, bloggers, and publishing on the internet. Everyone still loves a good linkdump – or even better these days, an email newsletter with a narrative. Today In Tabs is a personal favorite, though sometimes it’s a hateread about […]
- [What's next](https://ryansholin.com/2024/10/07/whats-next/): Last week, I left Automattic and the WordPress VIP team. You can read more about that move on LinkedIn. The reactions, comments, and messages in response to my post have been humbling, as they were internally when I announced my departure. When I write words like “it’s been an honor and a privilege,” I mean them. It has been an honor to work with some of the smartest and kindest people I’ve ever met, and it has been a privilege to walk into some of the biggest media companies, government organizations, and B2B marketing organizations on the planet to talk […]
- [Motorelektrik, an EP](https://ryansholin.com/2024/04/19/motorelektrik-an-ep/): I released some more music today, an EP of five songs, including three new tracks and two kinda sorta remixes/remasters/reduxes of songs from last year’s Breakage album. There are some more details on Tumblr, but I’ll try to say something different here, just for the exercise. When I released my first album last year, the culmination of a three-month sabbatical and lots of learning and gear shopping ahead of time, I made so much effort to not be self-deprecating about it, but there were a couple songs that just plan sounded broken, like something went wrong in the final panicked […]
- [Twenty Twenty Four](https://ryansholin.com/2024/01/30/twenty-twenty-four/): This website’s homepage had become a bit of a jumbled mix of unstructured posts and outdated navigation, so I spent about 40 minutes today updating it to the WordPress Twenty Twenty Four theme and doing some minor customization. That post list at the bottom reminds me of Khoi Vinh’s old Subtraction theme, which I used for a while, I think? (Sidenote, click through there, Khoi is still publishing!) I am off Twitter, my other social media is private these days, except LinkedIn, natch, but maybe I will blog here a bit about a few things this year.
- [Breakage, the album](https://ryansholin.com/2023/05/26/breakage-the-album/): Sabbatical project? Complete. Listen to Breakage, the album, in its entirety on Bandcamp . Here’s a quick preview: There are some notes about influences and inspirations and references and allusions (and one sample) in the Bandcamp pages for each of the ten original songs. There are some more notes about the process along the way on my Tumblr. There are even more notes and other little videos from various works-in-progress and other instrumental tracks on the @breakagemusic Instagram.
- [Jam-uary behind, sabbatical ahead, statement of purpose](https://ryansholin.com/2023/02/02/jam-uary-behind-sabbatical-ahead-statement-of-purpose/): The best thing about working at Automattic is probably all the brilliant people, and the second best thing is easily the before-it-was-cool distributed culture, but a three month paid sabbatical after five years of service is obviously in the top three best things. So here we are — I passed the five-year mark in November, and months before then, I decided how I wanted to spend a good chunk of my time off, which starts the first Monday in March of this year. I’m going to make an album. Of original music. Remember that time, in 2021, when I recorded […]
- ["I'm working on my family tree" is a perfectly good excuse to swear at your ancestors ten times a day](https://ryansholin.com/2022/11/14/im-working-on-my-family-tree-is-a-perfectly-good-excuse-to-swear-at-your-ancestors-ten-times-a-day/): One night a few weeks ago, instead of working on the family tree — which I have been doing in my “free” time (ha), rather obsessively, tbqh, for the past, oh, five months or so, judging by the increments of “ryansholin+freetrial5” accounts I am running on various genealogy websites — I tweeted about it. And it turns out, somewhat unsurprisingly, that many of you also enjoy swearing at your ancestors in your abundant free time. I never wanted to do this. When one previously unknown to me relative, many years and email addresses ago, first shared some details, questions, and […]
- [Today is the 152nd day of the year 2021](https://ryansholin.com/2021/06/01/today-is-the-152nd-day-of-the-year-2021/): Seems like a good day for a blog post! One Song Everyday Building (healthy) habits is not something that comes easily to me, so I always find “do this one thing every day of the year” projects appealing. A few years ago I made a “one second everyday” #1se video and surprised my family with it on the following New Year’s Day. (That was really nice.) In 2018, after starting a new job, I blogged every day for the first month of the year as a bit of a dogfood exercise. (And really, I “blog” using internal tools at work […]
- [Leaving behind WebFaction](https://ryansholin.com/2019/03/27/leaving-behind-webfaction/): I started hosting This Website with WebFaction in 2008, just after moving to Rochester, with the plan of also using WebFaction’s notably flexible and well-supported systems to host sites using Django (ReportingOn), and ended up using them for multiple other WordPress sites that came up from time to time, as well as other experiments, side projects, and cron jobs over the years. It was great! A couple years back, GoDaddy acquired WebFaction, and although I don’t really have anything against GoDaddy — they’re a much better company since switching CEOs around 2011 (you’ll note their Super Bowl commercials took a […]
- [Days twenty-nine, thirty, and thirty-one: Reflections on trying to blog every day for a month](https://ryansholin.com/2019/02/01/days-twenty-nine-thirty-and-thirty-one-reflections-on-trying-to-blog-every-day-for-a-month/): I didn’t blog every day for a month. I didn’t miss by much, but it’s definitely easier to be disciplined about it at home than it is on the road. I thought it would be a good experiment, writing slightly longer, compared to a tweet, and it often felt satisfying to mash the publish button. The daily pressure was noticed, though, and reminded me of the year I did one of those one-second-per-day videos. Sometimes you just need to point the camera at the sky; sometimes you just need to jot down some thoughts about jotting down thoughts. I’m writing […]
- [Days twenty-seven and twenty-eight](https://ryansholin.com/2019/01/29/days-twenty-seven-and-twenty-eight/): Written on the morning of the 29th, natch. Whenever I hear the words “business traveler,” I picture someone older than me in a suit. When I travel for work, I see those people, and except for the single-meeting trips where I might wear a suit jacket (honestly, I have no idea what’s a sport coat and what’s a blazer, so use your imagination), I usually look pretty casual and beardy and not businessy. But there I am, moving through airports, traveling for work, doing my best to feel less like an electron going through a wire and more like a […]
- [Days twenty-five and twenty-six](https://ryansholin.com/2019/01/26/days-twenty-five-and-twenty-six/): Hey this daily habit thing is challenging! Whatever I thought I might write about today was just wiped clean because we just watched BlacKkKlansman and it’s going to take a few minutes to recover. Spike still has some shots left in him, that’s for sure. I remember one time he gave a talk at NYU, in the coffee shop on the ground floor of Tisch, when one movie or another of his was coming out, but he had to get to the Yankees game and was a little impatient with us, short on time, and how many times had he […]
- [Day twenty-four](https://ryansholin.com/2019/01/24/day-twenty-four/): Part of what I love about Vampire Weekend is the fact that my wife likes their music, too. Spend your life with someone, and it’s nice if there’s not just music you can enjoy together, but music you can enjoy together across multiple states on road trips, for the 19th time, playing on repeat, and maybe if the kids can bounce around in their seats, that’s a plus. There’s new music from Vampire Weekend (yes, yes, asterisk minus Rostam, fine) for the first time in six years, and it’s lovely enough. Last time around I spent lots of time with […]
- [Day twenty-three](https://ryansholin.com/2019/01/23/day-twenty-three/): When I was in third grade or so, I thought “23” was going to be the perfect age. I’d be out of college, a successful adult in the world, driving my Maserati or whatever I thought was cool — but not that cool — as an eight-year-old, and living the good life as the founder of Sholin Industries, whatever that was going to be. Business! Maybe that was the year I wanted to be “a businessman” when I grew up, which no doubt led to grandparents telling me I should go to Harvard, because that’s where you go to become […]
- [Day twenty-two](https://ryansholin.com/2019/01/22/day-twenty-two/): A busy day of work and parenting, somehow fitting in XBox skating with the boy and measurable progress on the Vargas Llosa book I’m reading (translated into English), but practicing my Spanish has been one of the highlights of my week so far. I’ve explained hundreds of times, en Español: Soy de Miami, y cuando era joven, estudié Español por muchos años en escuela. Despues, estaba viviendo en Nueva York, y estaba hablando Español con mis vecinos Puertorriqueños y los camioneros Mexicanos a mi trabajo. (I can go on, often mentioning my wife’s family, or where I practiced Spanish when […]
- [Day twenty-one](https://ryansholin.com/2019/01/21/day-twenty-one/): It was so cold today here that I ended up with Tom Waits in my head: “…colder than a welldigger’s ass…” And I can’t remember now if Diamonds on my Windshield is on Heart of Saturday Night or if I first heard it on the hilarious/sad/underwhelming Beat Generation box set I bought myself (likely with my employee discount) all those years ago, after coveting it for months in the record store. It had some real gems on it, Ginsberg reading America as the closer, touches from Burroughs, Lenny Bruce (beat??), Kerouac himself reading his own work, implanting his cadence on […]
- [Day twenty](https://ryansholin.com/2019/01/20/day-twenty/): Yesterday, we watched Temple of Doom with the kids (well, the one who was stubborn enough to stay on the couch and suffer through it with us). Let me be the last one to tell you, it is as bad as you remember. I knew I had never really seen the whole movie more than once, because of the part with THE HEART but do you remember… The poorly developed female character? The racism? The other racism? Pretty sure there’s a third racism in there, too? Monkey brains? Bugs? The condescending continuity gaffe of setting this movie before Raiders but […]
- [Days seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen](https://ryansholin.com/2019/01/19/days-seventeen-eighteen-and-nineteen/): I’ve been dealing with what appears to be literally the flu, which seems to justify some excused absences from blogging here. We’re getting to the age where “living vicariously through your children” becomes a viable thing to do. They’re not what anyone would call “overscheduled,” but we do get out to swimming and soccer a few times a week, spending little bits of evenings by the pool or the field or the gym. I usually try not to sit inside the indoor pool area anymore, preferring the slightly less chlorinated air quality of the benches on the other side of […]
- [Day sixteen](https://ryansholin.com/2019/01/16/day-sixteen/): I almost forgot again! This aging challenge thing, where people are posting pictures of their early avatars and then today — this seems like close to the worst we can do, but maybe it’s just in fun. How many things is that true of, though? I saw one today of a glacier. Literally, 10 years ago, much ice, big wall, and today, kinda melty. You get the idea. I saw another meme about trans people NOPEing right off the road rather than play this game. It does seem insensitive: Reveal your old self, in context of the present, in full […]
- [Day fifteen](https://ryansholin.com/2019/01/15/day-fifteen/): It was easier to find “all my pictures of my dog” in the early days of Flickr, when I used tags for every family member and albums for every trip and no taxonomy was too obscure for me to fret over. Today I wanted to find “all my pictures of my dog” and it was hard and silly and dumb and I liked all my taxonomies just fine before I started dispersing everything thinly across the networks. I’m reminded of Delicious — the first time it looked dead, I imported All My Boomarks to this blog. There were… pros and […]
- [Day fourteen](https://ryansholin.com/2019/01/14/day-fourteen/): I tweeted once today, but it was a retweet about work, so does it really count? I don’t think so. If you’re not steeping yourself in being an extremely online person and then you crack open the door now and then during a busy day, it’s like a wall of memes stares back at you. You check Facebook once or twice a day and it’s not enough to see what’s new, so you just see the things your friends are most involved in right now. It’s quite zeitgeisty! You might see the same viral video three days in a row […]
- [Day thirteen](https://ryansholin.com/2019/01/13/day-thirteen/): Today the boy played in the snow for more than five hours, without lunch, without a drink of water, without a thought about soccer or school or video games — well, it’s likely he talked about all three with his friends, but mostly it was just continuous sled rides until I fetched him sometime past two. Raiders holds up fine, but it’s also mostly a string of set pieces with a remarkably silly ending. I mean, in retrospect, the supernatural Ark is a solid setup for the climax of Holy Grail, but there’s no real logic holding it together. The […]
- [Day twelve, belated](https://ryansholin.com/2019/01/13/day-twelve-belated/): My father always told me it takes three weeks to build a habit, but I didn’t make it two before forgetting to type something into this firstnamelastnamedotcom machine. I mean, maybe it’s still yesterday somewhere in the far western Pacific just shy of the international date line? (A fascination to children with globes of all eras.) We’re in the middle of our first respectable snow event of the season, so our plans for the day include a viewing of Raiders of the Lost Ark, or at least the opening scene, depending on how the kids react. I watched Raiders so […]
- [Day eleven](https://ryansholin.com/2019/01/11/day-eleven/): Whew I almost forgot to blog tonight! A thing about living in the exurbs is that to anyone else, your neighborhood could look explicitly like Anytown, USA, but to you these are distinct, recognizable views. We live in an exurb with particular tracts of land delineated by homeowners associations, tracts that used to be farm (honestly, plantation), and now are dotted with clumps of townhouses, two-story single-family homes, and the odd bit of “affordable” apartment buildings blended into the landscape for good measure. Our HOA (like many others) is strict enough to legislate what color paint you can use on […]
- [Day ten](https://ryansholin.com/2019/01/10/day-ten/): Dear diary, Today I unfollowed like a thousand people on Twitter. Honestly, who were all those strangers? On one hand, I followed many people for many reasons, and didn’t feel like I added too much mental overhead to my life by clicking the follow button. OTOH tho, omg that was a lot of strangers to follow, and in the end, I found I was making myself anxious not knowing who it was OK to fave or reply to or RT, and during actual news events it just got silly. So I’ve brought it down to somewhere near 700, I think, […]
- [Day nine](https://ryansholin.com/2019/01/09/day-nine/): It’s the ninth day of the year, my ninth day in a row thumbtyping something into this publishing machine, because the streak is just getting started. Have I ever blogged here nine days in a row before? Mayyyybe at the beginning, in grad school, excited about everything. Have I ever written nine posts here without a link dump / clip show / recommendation post? Definitely not. So here are three things… I’m reading Space Opera, which opens, more or less, with the greatest alien arrival scene since Hitchhiker’s Guide, and seems to go on very much in that spirit. So […]
- [Day eight](https://ryansholin.com/2019/01/08/day-eight/): Every morning, I walk the dog along a variable route on our neighborhood sidewalks and paths, usually along the shores of one, two, or three of our little lakes, depending on the weather, her mood, and how many other dogs we see (and avoid — her behavior around other dogs is… suboptimal.) In warm weather, there are herons in the area, and I spot them frequently enough that I started using a #dailyheron tag on Instagram. I was a little surprised to see one out today: Late in 2017 and at least into the spring of 2018, I was using […]
- [Day seven](https://ryansholin.com/2019/01/07/day-seven/): Did everyone get a sunrise like this today, or is the steam from our friendly neighborhood data centers starting to change our microclimate? Just asking… I remember waking up to smog-filtered kaleidoscope sunrises in New Jersey, sleeping on floors working on student films my junior year of college. That spring, I learned to love sandbags and c-stands and Jameson and cutting up light. That was also the spring after I had gone vegan, and getting myself fed on student film sets was a fun sport, as it would be on independent films for a couple years. I had this Mars […]
- [Day six](https://ryansholin.com/2019/01/06/day-six/): At the end we preferred to travel all night,  Sleeping in snatches,  With the voices in our ears, saying  That this was all folly.  – T. S. Eliot, Journey of the Magi …but also about parenting, probably. We arrived at Epiphany today with the second child ailing of the stomach bug that kept the first up all night Thursday and home from school on Friday. We strove on, nevertheless, and took down the decorations, somehow fit everything back in the appropriate containers and closet, and continued polishing off leftovers. I’m working on a luxurious pork broth for a ramen dinner […]
- [Day five](https://ryansholin.com/2019/01/05/day-five/): Weekends can be tricky! But the streak must go on. There aren’t any tweets in my Notes file today, but this might’ve been a good self-deprecating thought, whether or not it’s original: Y’know, for someone who likes to avoid conflict, I sure do enjoy replaying every one in my head over and over again. Photo projects, like figuring out how to recover and host and categorize 15+ years of images from across multiple social networks, are a bit of a cobbler’s children problem for me. My mom is a photographer, and did portraits and parties for years, but our own […]
- [Day four](https://ryansholin.com/2019/01/04/day-four/): Me: Has a stubborn cold throughout holiday season. Also me: Stubbornly consumes a large percentage of the gluten, sugar, and dairy laden holiday foods in the house. Every time I’ve opened Twitter on my desktop this week, it’s 90 percent people dunking on people and 10 percent AOC dancing. Guess which I prefer? I’m allowing myself a really limited amount of faves when I open Twitter on desktop. (I usually fave a LOT of tweets.) Kinda feel like cutting it back to one a day and really making a conscious choice about it ugh. Please enjoy this selfie from the […]
- [Day three](https://ryansholin.com/2019/01/03/day-three/): We’re the kind of people who keep their Christmas lights up until Epiphany… Dear diary, today I didn’t check Twitter or Facebook until after lunch, and it was fine.
- [Day two](https://ryansholin.com/2019/01/02/day-two/): Back to work means back at my laptop all day, with too easy access to Twitter and Facebook and all the rest, but it was great to spend a bunch of focused time catching up on email and other research after the holidays. WordPress.com has TV commercials now, which is both wild and refreshing: What would you do if you could do anything? #anythingispossible pic.twitter.com/x2hg0BPwYs — WordPress.com (@wordpressdotcom) January 2, 2019 Meanwhile, here are today’s tweets I would’ve sent from my phone: This is the most Monday Wednesday ever. The old Toys R Us jingle in my head like a […]
- [Day one](https://ryansholin.com/2019/01/01/day-one/): https://twitter.com/ryansholin/status/1079909092414640128?s=20 It’s the first day of the year 2019, and for Reasons, I have deleted Facebook, FB Messenger, and Twitter from my phone in recent days. It hasn’t been entirely unpleasant! But also, I have found myself jusssssst the slightest bit thirsty for the incessant flow of information a ridiculously powerful piece of glass in my hand has to offer. The good news: I’ve spent less time staring at my phone. And when I am, I’m playing lots of chess. Although my rating has collapsed in the last couple days of this winter break. Today, on my first full day […]
- [This blog is now running WordPress 5.0](https://ryansholin.com/2018/12/06/this-blog-is-now-running-wordpress-5-0/): …and I am typing this in the new Gutenberg editor.
- [Youth Against Fascism](https://ryansholin.com/2018/09/24/youth-against-fascism/): I believe Anita Hill
- [Family road trip, Summer 2018](https://ryansholin.com/2018/07/21/family-road-trip-summer-2018/): We left the dog and the house and the garden behind, told them all to be good, and took off up Route 15, across the Potomac, retracing our usual path past Cunningham Falls, into the territory in Central Pennsylvania.
- [What to do when the World Cup is over, 2018 edition](https://ryansholin.com/2018/07/15/what-to-do-when-the-world-cup-is-over-2018-edition/): In 2010, the first World Cup where I really paid attention to my own country’s team and cheered them on in a more-than-casual way, I was crushed after they lost to Ghana in the Round of 16, and I wrote this post about what to do next to keep paying attention to soccer, while being an American. In 2014, apparently I was so out of touch with this blog that I wrote nothing the entire calendar year. I guess I was tweeting? Anyway, I certainly was crushed after the #USMNT’s loss to Belgium in the Round of 16, and I kept […]
- [Three books that changed my mind in the past three months](https://ryansholin.com/2018/01/31/three-books-changed-mind-past-three-months/): I’ve been trying to read more. Books. Not just staring at my phone. Unless there’s a book on it! I read a decent percentage of Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle that way. A few years ago. I didn’t finish the last book. I’m not saying you shouldn’t spend a ton of time staring into a block of glass that’s permanently fused to your hand, as long as there’s a book on the screen. But yeah, I’m trying to get back to books. Six years ago I asked for book recommendations on Twitter, and revisited those more recently to provide a progress report. […]
- [An update on the reading list you assigned me in March 2012](https://ryansholin.com/2017/12/14/update-reading-list-assigned-march-2012/): Storify is over. I’m old enough to remember working for a startup that built tools to curate social media posts into news articles before Storify did a much, much better job of it. 😉 I remember hearing about the idea for Storify from Burt Herman at ONA in San Francisco in 2009, which of course seems like a thousand years ago now. I had the chance to congratulate him on the acquisition by Livefyre a few years later, and raised my eyebrows from afar when Adobe picked them up and rolled pieces of it into their own suite of marketing […]
- [For the people](https://ryansholin.com/2017/11/27/for-the-people/): I’m starting a new job today as an Enterprise Growth Engineer on the WordPress VIP team at Automattic. I’m a little bit excited. If you know me at all, you know that no matter the title, my job in news has always been to evangelize for new technology to serve journalism. As a reporter, an editor, a product manager, a team leader — I’ve tried to give journalists the tools and training they need to successfully reach (and move! and impact!) their readers, while growing their audience and building sustainable models for the future. WordPress has often been a part […]
- [Telling the story of metrics inside your news organization](https://ryansholin.com/2017/11/10/telling-the-story-of-metrics-inside-your-news-organization/): I’m presenting this at a Poynter event called Measuring Journalism on Nov. 10, 2017. My slides are available here, but I needed some blogging exercise, too. I love it when the numbers jump off the screen In my dozen-plus years in the news business, whenever I’m asked — often in a job interview — what my favorite part of my work is, I tell a little story about the first time I took a serious look at an analytics report for multiple news sites, back at GateHouse Media. Sure, I had been responsible for paying attention to Omniture (or was […]
- [Why remote works](https://ryansholin.com/2017/03/17/why-remote-works/): I’ve been at Chalkbeat for more than 15 months now, working remotely on a permanent basis for the first time, after two six-month stretches at the beginning of my gigs with GateHouse and Publish2 way back in late aughts. In those early, somewhat forced “work from home for six months and then move to our office please” situations, I had no idea what I was doing. In Santa Cruz, employed by Rochester-based GateHouse, I worked at East Coast schedule in a West Coast time zone, working from around 6am to 3pm, and then showering and taking our infant daughter off […]
- [P E R S O N A L   N E W S](https://ryansholin.com/2015/12/02/p-e-r-s-o-n-a-l-n-e-w-s/): Seriously, when did we start calling new job news “personal news” and why? It’s professional news. It’s just me, getting a new job. Personal news is “we adopted a dog” (we did!) or “we’re having another kid” (we’re not!) or maybe “we’re moving to New York” (also not happening!). But other things *are* happening. Personal News I am excited to tell you that I have a new job starting next week. I’m joining Chalkbeat to lead product and growth. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news organization that’s reimagining local news with a focus on issues of inequity in education. I’m grateful […]
- [Elsewhere, recently, blogging](https://ryansholin.com/2015/11/25/elsewhere-recently-blogging/): Remember when I remembered blogging? Hard to believe that was almost four months ago, but there it is. Meanwhile… Here’s what I did after I posted that real live actual blog post on my blog here at ryansholin.com: I wrote a Medium post from my phone. It was about Sleater-Kinney and writing and content management systems. And about writing on phones. (Not too long after, Medium updated lots of features, including their mobile writing/editing screens, so some of this was happily and quickly made totally invalid.) I wrote a Kinja post from my phone. It was about tacos and emoji […]
- [Remember blogging?](https://ryansholin.com/2015/08/04/remember-blogging/): Cracks me up. Every time. Not sure how it started, but my top skill of “Top Skills” on LinkedIn is Blogging. Remember blogging? Every now and then someone tells that joke. The one that goes “Remember blogs?” Ha. Ha ha. It’s funny, because the blogs won, and most of the websites/apps/screenthings we use on a daily basis either *are* blogs or they look like blogs. But we don’t write personal blogs these days, do we? (Look, I know this is well-trod territory, but every time I look at this particular personal blog and see the last post was May 2013, […]
- [May Linkdump](https://ryansholin.com/2013/05/31/may-linkdump/): I read a lot of stuff. Or look at it, anyway. I save some of it. I tweet some of it. Not much, really. Here are some of the most interesting/useful/provocative/linkbaitey things I set aside for repeated/deeper/continued consumption since I last published a Linkdump post on April 10, 2013. Teacher Testimonial: How Rap Genius Fixed My English Class: If you haven’t been following my interest in emerging annotation platform Rap Genius, you’re missing out. I like it. I like the annotation tools, complete with a simple Redditish flavor of Markdown, I like the casual copyright infringement (so sorry I uploaded your […]
- [#sholinonrap on Clayton Christensen](https://ryansholin.com/2013/05/24/sholinonrap-on-clayton-christensen/): It’s been a good week for guest speakers here at the office. Gary Vaynerchuk was here on Tuesday, and Clayton Christensen spoke yesterday. Pretty much a coincidence, I think, as their talks were part of two different programs here, but I think Christensen would happily cite @garyvee as an example of his theories in action. So Gary was fun, but I was looking forward to Christensen. There’s a not-too-thin logical chain where I have a job in this industry because of his research getting into the hands of certain early online news adopters. When Gary spoke, I think I promised […]
- [This is a linkdump](https://ryansholin.com/2013/04/10/this-is-a-linkdump/): At the risk of doing what I’m best at — overstating the obvious — you might have noticed that I don’t use this blog much anymore. Actually, I do use it, maybe once a year or so, to communicate the fact that I don’t write many blog posts these days, and you should just follow me on Twitter or somewhere else if you’re interested. But that’s barely true. I don’t “talk” about “media” stuff much on Twitter, although I sort of do, depending on how you feel about reading between the lines, but sometimes a GIF is just a GIF. […]
- [11 websites that should never, ever have a Facebook open graph read action that tells my friends what I am looking at on the Internet](https://ryansholin.com/2012/11/29/fun-with-facebook-open-graph-read-actions/): Gawker Deadspin Most other Gawker sites, really. Reddit TMZ Amazon Any website mentioning the name “Hunter Moore” Every alternative weekly ever. Yahoo News Slideshows YouTube Anything still hosted at a blogspot.com domain  
- [Link: How to Use the "Network Density" Formula to Measure the Health of a Community](https://ryansholin.com/2012/10/25/link-how-to-use-the-network-density-formula-to-measure-the-health-of-a-community/): I’m a sucker for engagement formulas, especially when they help provide a means to quantitatively track something that sounds as fluffy and qualitative as “the health of a community.” Great ideas here for community managers and related parties: How to Use the “Network Density” Formula to Measure the Health of a Community  
- [FAQ on how the New York Times handles comments](https://ryansholin.com/2012/10/15/faq-on-how-the-new-york-times-handles-comments/): New York Times Public Editor Margaregt Sullivan on their workflow and editorial collaboration on the question of comments: Questions and Answers on How The Times Handles Online Comments From Readers
- [Current obsessions](https://ryansholin.com/2012/08/30/current-obsessions/): In no particular order… Men In Blazers, a soccer podcast by Brits of some vintage, in New York City, mostly, for ESPN’s Grantland. Funny. Roadrunner, by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers. Hay Day, an iPhone farm game. Or as we call it in my household (all members of the household, cats excluded) “the farm game” or even just “the farm.” Trying to get sort of OK at, well, Rubik’s Cube. Reddit. Alt Latino, from NPR, because, seriously, where else are you going to hear interesting new (and old) Latin music?
- [A good quick read on Product Management](https://ryansholin.com/2012/08/06/a-good-quick-read-on-product-management/): Some of the basics of product management, from A List Apart, for both of you wondering what I’ve been doing for the last couple years: Product Management for the Web. Not everything applies, and there are a lot of assumptions in this about Agile and the size of the organization involved, but it’s a good overview.
- [Why Italy?](https://ryansholin.com/2012/06/26/why-italy/): On Sunday, after bearing the brunt of an excited explanation of Italy’s glorious victory over England via penalties, including a stunning Panenka from Pirlo, my own wife turned around and asked me why I was rooting for the Azzurri. This was weird, because it’s her fault. (Hey, this is a blog post about soccer. If you’re not interested, feel free to stop reading here.)
- [2012 Civic Media Conference takeaways, open questions, reactions, notes](https://ryansholin.com/2012/06/19/2012-civic-media-conference-takeaways-open-questions-reactions-notes/): It’s been three years since I last made the trek to Cambridge for what we once called KNCMIT, and although the cast of characters has changed (with little-to-no representation of 2007-8-9 Knight News Challenge winners, different faces at the MIT Media Lab, and a rebooted Knight Foundation posse) the outcome was similar. All unhappy airport terminals are alike, so the sense of deja vu carries over from the hotel to the cab to the fluorescent carpeted discomfort of Logan, and the foreboding sense of dread that comes with a United flight. (Prove me wrong, airline. Prove me wrong.) On to […]
- [A future history of crowdsourced reporting](https://ryansholin.com/2012/06/14/a-future-history-of-crowdsourced-reporting/): During the second or third or so year of my still-brief career in what we might as well call “the news business” for lack of a more encompassing and descriptive term, I found myself jumping up and down advocating for a tool to standardize the task of gathering data from the news audience. Crowdsourcing as a term was new, and by definition “bigger” than just “sourcing” because it could happen at scale, where scale could be thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people with the right call to action and programming framework. WNYC’s “beer, lettuce, milk” price data gathering project […]
- [Channel switching](https://ryansholin.com/2012/06/14/channel-switching/): Not sure how much I have to say these days, as most of my media-thinking-and-writing happens in the office and not on this or any blog, but I’m going to make a run at switching back to WordPress from the Tumblr I’ve been barely touching. We’ll see. No promises.
- [The Weight](https://ryansholin.com/2012/01/06/the-weight/): [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WmlUXsjSv8[/youtube]
- [My best unpublished drafts of 2011](https://ryansholin.com/2012/01/05/my-best-unpublished-drafts-of-2011/): The way things go with kids and life and work and all that these days, I’m not having any sort of big “this year I’m going to get back to blogging” feeling right about now. Too busy. Find me on Twitter. Maybe I’ll use Tumblr more. Maybe not. Which brings us to a list, not of my most popular blog posts of last year (and really, who has the ego for that in 2012?) — but rather, of my best unpublished drafts. Be inspired. 1. My ultimate journalism hacker masters program (April) Looks like this was a response to a Dave […]
- [This.](https://ryansholin.com/2011/12/21/this/): @andymboyle not every piece of journalism software is a public-facing news app built on deadline. — jonathanstray (@jonathanstray) December 21, 2011  
- [Workspace](https://ryansholin.com/2011/11/18/workspace/): Workspace: Great notes on a home office setup, including an adjustable desk that isn’t always standing or sitting, plus a “thinking chair” for lean-back time. From Trent Walton.
- [The newspaper that almost seized the future](https://ryansholin.com/2011/11/16/the-newspaper-that-almost-seized-the-future/): The newspaper that almost seized the future: The amazing true story of digital innovation and atrophy over more years than you’d expect at the San Jose Mercury News, from CJR.
- [The blog post about that time I spent the week in the hospital and they took out part of my intestines](https://ryansholin.com/2011/11/03/the-blog-post-about-that-time-i-spent-the-week-in-the-hospital-and-they-took-out-part-of-my-intestines/): If we’re friends on Facebook, you’ve likely already pieced most of this together. If not… Last Friday night, I was slammed with stomach problems like I’d never experienced before, and by the time the #snowtober storm started on Saturday morning, I was on my way to the emergency room. First ever ambulance ride. A day later, a colonoscopy turned up, well, some weird stuff in my large intestine, and a day after that I was in surgery. I’m happy to say that the report on the chunk of intestines they cut out of me (and hey, go ahead and take […]
- [Wanted: The Unfollowemator](https://ryansholin.com/2011/10/25/wanted-the-unfollowemator/): As a Twitter user, I want a way to automatically unfollow users who mention specific terms with a certain sentiment, so that I can easily filter out people with which you just can’t argue. Acceptance Criteria: This tool should use the latest version of OAuth to allow the user to connect their Twitter account to the application. This tool should allow the user to enter a keyword or keywords into a text field, then choose an emotional state (probably limited to positive/negative in the first iteration) to filter on. For example, a user might search for positive mentions of “McRib” […]
- [35](https://ryansholin.com/2011/10/19/35-2/): I accidentally filled out a marketing survey this morning and realized I had slipped into a new demographic. Ouch. Older.
- [A short list of things that make me want to buy an iPad](https://ryansholin.com/2011/10/18/a-short-list-of-things-that-make-me-want-to-buy-an-ipad/): Instapaper 4.0 The Guardian Flipboard, still Tabbed browsing in Safari Facebook Lugging a 15.4-inch laptop around to meetings Any better reasons?
- [Is Dan Sinker's book making me angry?](https://ryansholin.com/2011/10/11/is-dan-sinkers-book-making-me-angry/): Well, no, of course not. In fact, the Epic Quest makes me happy every time I pick it up. I’ve caught myself pages deep, on the couch with my four-year-old who is impatiently reminding me that she has a book of her own in mind, and hey, why is there a duck on your book, and then I snap out of it and Quaxelrod heads back to the end table, where he sits perched atop an unfinished Clay Shirky tome that is infinitely more relevant to my day job. Anyway, the funny thing is, I don’t curse on Twitter. Or […]
- [Introduction to open-source GIS tools for journalists](https://ryansholin.com/2011/09/20/introduction-to-open-source-gis-tools-for-journalists/): Introduction to open-source GIS tools for journalists: GIS software is expensive, right? Wait, there are open source GIS tools now? And Matt Wynn wrote up a few for Poynter? Let me mash my mouse on that link…
- [Bootstrap, from Twitter](https://ryansholin.com/2011/08/22/bootstrap-from-twitter/): Bootstrap, from Twitter: Wow. This is a full CSS library of sorts for that web app you were going to build next. Great treatments for forms, too. Even supports IE7. Spotted via Daniel.
- [q&a: brian boyer on the plan for panda](https://ryansholin.com/2011/08/20/qa-brian-boyer-on-the-plan-for-panda/): q&a: brian boyer on the plan for panda: Ben Welsh talks with Brian Boyer about the ingredients for PANDA, a Newsroom Data Appliance. PANDA will be a place for folks in the newsroom to stash their data, and a tool for helping reporters search and compare data sets. Trust me, your newsroom needs a PANDA. Excited for this.
- [MediaNews Group Adds Paywalls To 23 More Newspapers](https://ryansholin.com/2011/08/20/medianews-group-adds-paywalls-to-23-more-newspapers/): MediaNews Group Adds Paywalls To 23 More Newspapers: Please note just how small these 23 markets are.
- [The AP-Google Journalism and Technology Scholarship](https://ryansholin.com/2011/08/15/the-ap-google-journalism-and-technology-scholarship/): The AP-Google Journalism and Technology Scholarship: “The AP-Google Journalism and Technology Scholarship program will provide $20,000 scholarships for the 2012-13 academic year to six promising undergraduate or graduate students pursuing or planning to pursue degrees at the intersection of journalism, computer science and new media.”
- [Is Reddit journalism? The inevitable investigation.](https://ryansholin.com/2011/08/14/is-reddit-journalism-the-inevitable-investigation/): If your interaction with Reddit is anything like mine, you’re a 9-percenter. Remember the 90-9-1 rule of online community interaction? Well, on Reddit, I rarely say a word, and I’ve probably never started a thread, but I do so enjoy their magical little UI for upvoting posts and comments, especially on my phone, often in the middle of the night while trying to get a child back to sleep. That places me somewhere between a lurker (90 percent) who never logs in, just reads and scans, and at best, might link to a thread from elsewhere, and an active participant […]
- [Adventures in Paywalls: The 'Longshot' Magazine Nagwall](https://ryansholin.com/2011/08/02/adventures-in-paywalls-the-longshot-magazine-nagwall/): Adventures in Paywalls: The ‘Longshot’ Magazine Nagwall: The Awl’s take on the Longshot “nagwall,” which is sort of a combination of a “sharewall” and “nudgeware” and… Well, call it what you want, but I haven’t seen it yet, after skimming 4 or 5 stories, which is nice. In other news, Longshot is excellent, and you should read it, buy it, and help fund the next issue.
- [Rupert Murdoch, The Master Mogul of Fleet Street—Vanity Fair’s Latest E-Book](https://ryansholin.com/2011/08/02/rupert-murdoch-the-master-mogul-of-fleet-street-vanity-fairs-latest-e-book/): Rupert Murdoch, The Master Mogul of Fleet Street—Vanity Fair’s Latest E-Book: A wise approach to turning your archives into a revenue source beyond what SEO and topic pages bring. Package your best stories about a given topic as an e-book, a Kindle Single, a PDF download, with a short design cycle and potentially, a big return on a small investment.
- [Revised branding](https://ryansholin.com/2011/07/27/revised-branding/): The deed is done. This blog, which has carried my name in its domain for more than six years, no longer has a title other than my name. For now. Until I change my mind. Or freak out about branding.
- [The snark of working in public](https://ryansholin.com/2011/07/27/the-snark-of-working-in-public/): The art of working in public: In which Robin Sloan writes a great blog post about other people writing great blog posts. “I have two exemplary pieces of 21st-century writing that I want to share with you. Neither is hot off the CMSes; they’ve both aged just a little in their tabbed casks. They have something deeply in common—though it might not be obvious at first.” From my point of view, “writing great blog posts” feels like a thing of the past, except for a faithful few inspiring souls who still strive to build connections and point to common threads […]
- [Daniel's status treatment](https://ryansholin.com/2011/07/27/daniels-status-treatment/): I really like what Daniel is doing with his “statuses” in WordPress. Assume this is a custom post type. I think he started blogging these while taking a(nother) break from Twitter. In his RSS feed, these show up with a plain title of “Status” — I find this to be sort of amusing.
- [What Are The 20 Most Expensive Keyword Categories In Google AdWords?](https://ryansholin.com/2011/07/27/what-are-the-20-most-expensive-keyword-categories-in-google-adwords/): What Are The 20 Most Expensive Keyword Categories In Google AdWords?: I feel like this list and its evolution over time provides us with a really depressing mirror directed at our commercial society. “11. Conference Call”  
- [Branding](https://ryansholin.com/2011/07/27/branding/): I’m strongly leaning toward dropping the “Invisible Inkling” brand from this blog entirely, in an effort to appear moderately less pretentious. I am fully aware that using three adverbs in the previous sentence — and writing it at all, not to mention this one, makes it difficult to make the “less pretentious” argument with any level of confidence, so let’s just pretend you didn’t read that part. Reaching back into the archives of this here blog, it looks like the switch from “Ryan Sholin’s J-School Blog” to “Invisible Inkling” happened in September 2006 when I was done with most of my […]
- [Knight Foundation expands into investment with an Enterprise Fund](https://ryansholin.com/2011/07/26/knight-foundation-expands-into-investment-with-an-enterprise-fund/): Knight Foundation expands into investment with an Enterprise Fund: I missed this while on vacation last week, but as a sort of expansion of the Knight News Challenge, there’s now a 10 million dollar Knight Foundation fund to invest in for-profit companies. I continue to think this is a good idea.
- [Best of Digital News Design Winners](https://ryansholin.com/2011/07/26/best-of-digital-news-design-winners/): Best of Digital News Design Winners: From March 2011, SND’s online news design award winners.
- [A Powerful Tool for Local Journalism: Contextualized News on a Map](https://ryansholin.com/2011/07/26/a-powerful-tool-for-local-journalism-contextualized-news-on-a-map/): A Powerful Tool for Local Journalism: Contextualized News on a Map: Alexis Madrigal, like many who have commented so far, are impressed with Tackable’s tablet news map app. Me, too.

## Pages

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- [Barry Sholin - A Celebration of Life](https://ryansholin.com/barry/): May 6, 1943 – April 25, 2021 Thank you to the friends and family who joined us in a celebration of Barry’s life on May 7, 2021. Donations Please consider honoring Barry’s memories of hiking, canoeing, and camping in the American wilderness with a donation to the Sierra Club at https://sierraclub.org or make a donation to Capital Caring at https://www.capitalcaring.org/ to support the hospice organization that helped make his last days comfortable at home. Obituary Barry M. Sholin of Ashburn, Virginia, died at 77 years old, peacefully at home on April 25, 2021, after living with cancer for nine years. […]
- [Women get their blog on](https://ryansholin.com/work/clips/women-get-their-blog-on/): Oakland Tribune – July 26, 2006 It’s a Tuesday in July, and Alice Bradley’s Bloomfield, N.J., house seems to be melting. “It’s 98,000 degrees in here,” she said. Bradley is the woman behind Finslippy, a blog dedicated to documenting her personal adventures raising a son. This afternoon, Henry, now 4, interrupts her phone conversation to ask for a snack. “Want a yogurt?” Bradley asks him. “What kind? Vanilla?” Finslippy ranks among the most popular of the “mommy blogs,” but female bloggers have struggled to shake the stigma that the only things a woman can write about are motherhood, knitting and […]
- ['Wind is renewable and the fuel is free'](https://ryansholin.com/work/clips/wind-is-renewable-and-the-fuel-is-free/): Oakland Tribune – July 17, 2006 BIRDS LANDING — It’s a pastoral scene. Fields of golden grass and scrub brush wave in a gentle breeze. A jackrabbit crosses a country road. Ladybugs float by in the sun. A windmill turns overhead. The difference? This windmill is a 415-foot next-generation wind turbine with three 130-foot blades, and it can generate up to three megawatts of electricity when the wind speed reaches 30 mph. That’s enough energy to power at least 2,200 Bay Area homes over the course of a year. Eight of these new wind turbines tower over a Montezuma Hills […]
- [Sick welders seek justice from KFM](https://ryansholin.com/work/clips/sick-welders-seek-justice-from-kfm/): Oakland Tribune, August 24, 2006 The welders connecting the foundation of the new Bay Bridge to the rest of its structure labored in confined spaces up to 40 feet below the waterline in 150-degree temperatures while inhaling fumes measured above the legal limit for manganese. But when the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) slapped KFM Joint Venture with 17 citations last June, the state agency declined to cite the contractor for ignoring the claims of as many as 48 sick welders who blamed their illnesses on manganese overexposure, leaving them to fend for themselves in Bay Area […]
- [Behind the label: Certifiers weed through plenty to keep organic farmers in the green](https://ryansholin.com/work/clips/behind-the-label-certifiers-weed-through-plenty-to-keep-organic-farmers-in-the-green/): Oakland Tribune, October 29, 2006 Robert Magenheimer depends on ducks, mosquito fish and smart irrigation techniques to take care of his 500 acres of organic rice on a farm northwest of Lodi. “It’s a fun challenge,” he said. But early one morning in September, he waited at the edge of his property for a different sort of challenge: inspection day. Once a year, every certified organic farm in the United States is required to prove it deserves the organic label. An inspector pores over the farm’s records and its fields, looking for paperwork problems, obvious violations and potential problems. Magenheimer […]
- [Clips](https://ryansholin.com/work/clips/): In the summer of 2006, while a graduate student at San Jose State University, I reported for the ANG Regional Desk at the Oakland Tribune. ANG was the umbrella organization for all the MediaNews Group newspapers in the San Francisco Bay Area at the time, and the company had just purchased the San Jose Mercury News. The desk I was on focused on investigative and enterprise stories, along with state politics. Our stories often ran as Sunday or Monday centerpieces in all the Bay Area papers owned by the same company, reaching more than 700,000 readers at times. Here are […]
- [Knight Center for Specialized Journalism, Dec. 2009](https://ryansholin.com/speaking/kcsj1209/): Links and notes related to my presentation at the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism on December 2, 2009: “Send them away so they come back for more” is my version of something I must have originally read in a blog post like this one by Dave Winer, circa December 2005, although he might have said those exact words in a podcast I heard at some point. Memeorandum Alltop’s Politics page Newsweek’s Tumblr (See also: Why We Tumbl) The New York Times Bits Blog Best practices for journalists curating the Web, by Publish2 CEO Scott Karp Examples of news organizations using […]
- [Five ways to make social media work for you - VPA/ONA November 2009](https://ryansholin.com/speaking/vpa09/): Links to go with my VPA/ONA presentation on November 12, 2009 in Glen Allen, Va. @coloneltribune An onavpa Twitter list I’ve started. More on @statesman’s ads from Editor & Publisher. Publish2 Best practices for journalists curating the Web The slides from my presentation [PDF]
- [Poynter Best Practices 2009: Finding great journalism online](https://ryansholin.com/speaking/bp09/): The folks at Poynter asked me to talk about where I find great journalism online. My definition of journalism is pretty broad, but many of these sources, resources, and tools should be familiar to many of you. Recommended reading Gangrey: A blog compiling the best narrative and long-form journalism. Kottke: Jason Kottke, a full-time blogger, has been doing this since before you ever heard the word “blog” said out loud. Jason’s steady stream of links to top-shelf content is peppered with stories from the New York Times Magazine, New Yorker, and obscure-but-elegant photography installations and documentary video pieces. TimesPeople: Use […]
- [apse09](https://ryansholin.com/speaking/apse09/): (Photo by Bruce Carver / Indiana University) Here’s a list of some of the links I expect to talk about on June 25, 2009 at the annual APSE convention in Pittsburgh, Pa. Colonel Tribune on Twitter Twitter Search Publish2 New York Times tennis blog: Straight Sets New York Times technology blog: Bits Bits on Twitter The Knoxville News Sentinel’s use of Publish2 Why We Link BeatBlogging Ning Your Santa Cruz Sports See also the summary of the talk in this post on my five keys to authenticity for newsrooms getting into social media.
- [BCNIPhilly](https://ryansholin.com/speaking/bcniphilly/): Links and notes related to the discussion I led about ReportingOn at BCNIPhilly on Saturday, April 25, 2009: ReportingOn.com as it exists today. The process is on display at IdeaLab. You should probably already be thinking about entering the 2010 Knight News Challenge later this year. Help A Reporter Out is a better place to find a source when you absolutely, positively, have to have it by deadline. Pitch Engine is a great place to find topical feeds of press releases. Stack Overflow is the place for programmers to ask and answer questions. Here’s the presentation I gave in Philly […]
- [ReportingOn at SJSU](https://ryansholin.com/speaking/sjsuro/): Some notes and links for the presentation I’ll be giving on Monday, April 6, 2009 at San José State University as part of the requirements of my nearly-completed M.S. in Mass Communications: You can visit ReportingOn.com right now and use the username “sjsu” and the password “deadline” to take a look around the site as it stands today. Here’s the text summary of my project report, which will be available in print at the presentation. Here are my posts related to the project at the PBS IdeaLab blog. The ReportingOn blog. Follow ReportingOn on Twitter. I’ll put a version of […]
- [Newhouse](https://ryansholin.com/speaking/newhouse/): Alternative business models for news For Vin Crosbie‘s classes, here’s the list of links covering a brief tour of alternative business models for news. (Note, I didn’t say “newspapers,” but I did say news. We’re talking about Journalism here, not necessarily the business of running an ink-on-paper industrial age enterprise.) MediaShift: Your guide to alternative business models for newspapers Crowdfunding:  Spot.Us Customized PDFs:  Printcasting Nonprofit:  MinnPost.com Nonprofit:  ProPublica.org Multi-platform niche:  The Politico The real hyperlocal:  The Island of Alameda, West Seattle Blog Making the leap:  SeattlePI.com, AnnArbor.com Left behind?:  InDenverTimes.com What’s happening in online news right now? For Jon Glass […]
- [Speaking](https://ryansholin.com/speaking/): Here’s a list of the talks I’ve given, discussions I’ve led, panels I’ve sat in on, etc. in my travels in recent months: September 14, 2018: The Future of Content Creation, Layout, and Curation in WordPress (aka Gutenberg) and Remixing Content: Refining Your Workflow to Make Your Work Flow at ONA 2018 in Austin, Texas. November 10, 2017: Telling the story of metrics within your organization, at Measuring Journalism from Poynter in Chicago. July 14, 2017: Measuring Your Organization’s Impact with MORI from Chalkbeat, presented at the inaugural WordCamp DC. September 28, 2016: At the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) meeting […]
- [Contact](https://ryansholin.com/contact-2/): It’s been a long, long time since a human used a contact form on this website. I would encourage you to look me up on LinkedIn if you want to contact me about work things. If you look around there, or here, you can probably find a relatively intuitive email address for me, too. Those are the best ways to contact me.
- [Work](https://ryansholin.com/work/): The story goes like this: In the autumn of 2004, a former motion picture lighting technician, film school veteran, and bartender Googled the words “media ethics,” discovered Poynter, found Romenesko, and quickly stumbled across links to a nascent media blogosphere, where people were saying what he had been thinking. That was me discovering that I wanted to work in the media. Immediately. I wanted to help. I dropped everything and started graduate school at San Jose State University. Long before I was finished with my degree, I had my first full-time jobs in the news business. It’s now 2024, more […]
- [About](https://ryansholin.com/about/): I’m Ryan Sholin. Last updated August 2025. I am currently the Advocacy Lead at Electricity Maps. I left the WordPress VIP team at Automattic in 2024. (See this post for the origin story of my time at Automattic, or jump straight to my Work page for a brief history of my employment and whatnot.) In recent years, I worked for an enterprise web platform a nonprofit news network,  a newspaper company, a startup, a newspaper company, and before that, a newspaper. In Spring 2009, I finished up a graduate degree in Mass Communications at San Jose State University, with a thesis […]
- [Archives](https://ryansholin.com/archives/)
- [The Nature of News](https://ryansholin.com/the-nature-of-news/): [The following is one of three short literature reviews I wrote this semester for a graduate level Mass Communications Theory class. The citation style is specific to the class, but you can find relevant links at the end of the essay. Feedback is welcome.] While Lippmann (1922) explores the newsman’s challenge of translating “Truth” into news fit for print, McDonald (1971) questions whether the journalistic convention of objectivity helps or hinders in the process. Epstein (1974) and Roshco (1975) discuss how sources can manipulate the rhythms of the news cycle, imposing tight limits on the quantity and quality of the […]


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