Zombie Journalism

TBD.com came out of the gates with a few community engagement experiments you might find helpful at your own news orgs.

I had my first-ever TV appearance this morning on News Talk, a program produced by News Channel 8 (soon to be TBD’s TV side). I was brought on to talk about the rise of Facebook in the wake of its 500 millionth user signing up this week.
I couldn’t get the video up on a server [...]

For months now, I have been excitedly following the developing news of Allbritton’s local news site. As the parent company of Politico, many online types have hopes this as-yet-unnamed project can revitalize online news – and maybe give the Washington Post a run for their money.
I’m proud to say that as of today, I’m going [...]

When it comes to weather coverage, sometimes all we need to do is give readers the latest information. We at Cincinnati.Com used Wordpress to get the weather updates out in a simple, quick way during this month’s snow storms.

So I’ve been going through something of a journalistic identity crisis lately that’s put me in a real malaise about the industry at large and my own career. So if you’ll let me get a little personal for a post, I could use some help crafting a useful new job that could help my newsroom [...]

Probably my favorite project, Seen and Heard was a popular blog on local people-watching on JSOnline from 2005 to 2007. In addition to my usual work duties, I wrote this first person narrative blog as a labor of love. Even though the JS site did not yet have blog technology that could support commenting, I [...]

I was incredibly lucky to have spent a few years working at WKSU-FM, an excellent Northeast Ohio NPR station, for my graduate school fellowship. Each year WKU did a large-scale news series based around a topic in the news. During that time period, I got the chance to work with some of the best reporters [...]

The following video was created in conjunction with Anna Roberts in February of 2007 as part of a local newsroom package on global warming. We shot the man-on-the-street video interviews on a consumer-grade digital handheld camera and edited the video in Final Cut Pro.
And, by the way, this was one of the worst assignments ever. [...]

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel launched a project focusing on the efforts to fight the invasive Emerald Ash Borer in December of 2006. At that time, I had created a microsite for this project and also constructed the following  slideshow for the Dec. 15, 2006 edition. The microsite is no longer accessible.
MJS photographer Tom Lynn took [...]

When four white, off-duty police officers were found not guilty of beating Frank Jude at a party in April of 2006, the city of Milwaukee was in an uproar. The following rally took place the day after the verdict in the streets of downtown Milwaukee.
The images were shot by MJS photographers Michael Sears and Kristyna [...]