Jul 12, 2021For Journalists Considering a Move to TeachingWhat you need to know before you start — A time comes for many journalists when they think, “I’ve had a good run in this career, and now maybe I should transition to full-time teaching at a university.” …Teaching8 min readTeaching8 min read
Nov 12, 2017Choosing a major in collegeWhat’s really the best career for you, and how do you get there? — As an educator, I hear a lot of surprising stories about why students chose a major. The reasons often have little to do with the student’s real interests. (This essay, inspired by a New York Times article, Six Myths About Choosing a College Major, began as a Twitter thread.) Focusing…Education6 min readEducation6 min read
Published inCode Like A Girl·Jul 5, 2017Code and Journalism TodayWhat journalists and journalism educators should understand — When The Washington Post’s Ray Daly gave a talk about “JavaScript journalism” at JSConf back in May 2013, Snow Fall had appeared less than six months earlier. Daly showed dozens of examples in which JavaScript code had enhanced the storytelling in reports published online by news organizations ranging from the…Journalism7 min readJournalism7 min read
Jun 29, 2017Two 50+ women, one hot car, six national parksHow we traveled through Utah and Wyoming in June 2017 — Jodi says we’ve been trying to make this trip for 17 years. I say we started planning it three years ago, but whatever. We finally sat down in October 2016 and booked flights, a rental car, and five nights in Yellowstone. I was set on visiting Yellowstone, at last, for…Travel15 min readTravel15 min read
Apr 25, 2017How to professionalize your GitHub repoYou probably know that most code professionals use GitHub, and you probably realize that people are going to look at your GitHub repos when they are thinking about whether to hire you or offer you an internship. (If you’re not using GitHub yet, it’s easy to get started with the…Github2 min readGithub2 min read
Mar 1, 2016How to be a digital collaboratorA small business owner needs a website. She hires one of my students to build it. They have a conversation or two about what should be included. It’s not a large website — just five or six pages, with no e-commerce. It breaks down here: The Web designer asks the…Journalism5 min readJournalism5 min read
Mar 5, 2015The Future of Journalism Education (the Remix)A curated collection (with a few added remarks) from the 2015 Knight Foundation report “Above & Beyond.” Innovation News Center, College of Journalism and Communications, University of Florida Aggregator’s note: Text that is not in quotation marks is my own opinion unless clearly noted as coming from the report. …Journalism12 min readJournalism12 min read
Feb 25, 2015Storytelling NowA personal selection of outstanding stories from the 2015 Society of News Design competition. Journalism awards come out of long hours invested by judges, in rooms where too much junk food is consumed, as lists of links or stacks of entries are eyed, pondered, discussed. I did that last weekend…Journalism9 min readJournalism9 min read
Feb 15, 2015Sheep Fighting in SubangThose are the biggest testicles I have ever seen, I thought as the rams came off the small trucks, wrangled by men holding the animals’ giant crescent horns. Each ram’s scrotum looked like a jackfruit, huge and pendulous. The rams are bred for aggression so that they will fight. The…6 min read6 min read
Published inThoughts On Journalism·Apr 9, 2014(Re)defining multimedia journalismNew storytelling forms inspire us — Summary: “Snow Fall” was a watershed project, but we’ve already gone beyond that. Let’s focus on innovations in multimedia storytelling techniques. There’s no consensus among journalists about what the term multimedia means, or even whether to use it anymore. The multimedia skills listed in a job advertisement might span a…Journalism6 min readJournalism6 min read
