An easy way to embed tweets in a WordPress blog: copy and paste

For several months, I enjoyed being able to embed tweets in my blog using Blackbird Pie. But a few months ago, the embeds stopped working. Today I learned that it’s easier than ever to embed tweets into a WordPress.com blog. You just copy the URL of an individual tweet and paste it into the text [...]

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Another TBD lesson: Transparency is the best approach in good times and bad

A series of tweets last night reminded me of a lesson I should have included when I blogged last month about lessons from my TBD experience. David Cohn tweeted a link to a Noah Davis story about AOL’s Seed being pretty much defunct. I retweeted with my own comment, without a great deal of thought [...]

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5 years later: Newspaper Next didn’t change the news biz, but it changed me

Newspaper Next did not succeed in transforming the newspaper industry. But it transformed the career of this journalist. N2 attracted great curiosity in the newspaper business five years ago today with the release of its Blueprint for Transformation report. For the next year or so, the American Press Institute project was the talk of the [...]

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Developing a culture of innovation

I will be leading a workshop this afternoon for the National Newspaper Association on developing a culture of innovation. I have already blogged about many of the topics we will be discussing in the workshop. Some links that will be helpful to workshop participants interested in following up (and others interested in changing their culture):

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Carl Lavin studies Twitter use in covering Reno air crash

The Reno air show crash was exactly the kind of story that shows why Twitter is an essential tool for journalists covering breaking news. I was traveling and training and too busy to take more than passing notice of the story, much less study how journalists used Twitter in covering it. But Carl Lavin did [...]

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‘He said, she said’ stories fail to seek the truth and report it

I wish I had seen Jay Rosen’s latest critique of “he said, she said” reporting before Saturday’s accuracy workshop at Georgetown University. Jay provides an excellent example of reporting that is accurate but falls short of the journalistic principle of seeking the truth. That was a key point of the workshop: Yes, we taught about [...]

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How do you ‘convert’ curmudgeon journalists to using Twitter?

Brian Moritz asks a question you face in almost every newsroom addressing the challenges of digital journalism: How do you “convert” the curmudgeons? In a comment on my recent blog post providing social media resources for journalists, Brian, a Syracuse graduate student, asked: There are some reporters (mainly older vets, but a surprising number of [...]

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Resources to help journalists with accuracy and verification

I will be leading a workshop on accuracy and verification today with Craig Silverman for Georgetown University. My slides and Craig’s are below. Some resources Craig and I (and others) have developed to help journalists ensure accuracy: Craig’s Regret the Error blog (be sure to download his accuracy checklist).

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Storytelling techniques from a memorable clip: about Sept. 10 (not 11), 2001

I spent much of the year after 9/11 writing about the impact of that terrorist attack. I was a national correspondent for the Omaha World-Herald. The nation’s only academic center for Afghanistan studies was at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and I wrote dozens of stories about our city’s involvement with Afghanistan before and [...]

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Social media (mostly Twitter) resources for journalists

Here are resources to help journalists using Twitter and other social media. For the last few months, as I’ve been visiting Journal Register Co. newsrooms and blogging more tips for journalists using social media, I have been meaning to update my Twitter resources for journalists (now more than a year old). After today’s news that [...]

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Journal Register’s Digital First Media will manage MediaNews

Everyone in the news business knows at some level, even if they’re having trouble admitting it, that the future is digital. I’ve spent much of the past 15 years fighting legacy-media issues, mostly in the newspaper business but also for a couple companies in the TV business. I had great experiences, but hit brick walls [...]

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Suggestions (but not standards) for live tweeting

“Do you know of any standards for content of live tweets?” a commenter asked on my blog recently. “I have students live tweet meetings and speeches. Would love some specific guidelines for what makes a good tweet,” asked Michele Day, who teaches journalism at Northern Kentucky University. I know of no such standards. And if [...]

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