Dispatches from the living amongst journalism's walking dead

Tag: reporting

Magazine writing/reporting: ‘Harry Potter Goes to College’

This enterprise piece, written in December 2000 and published in the May 2001 issue of The Burr magazine at Kent State University, placed in the 2001 Hearst Awards.

It’s sort of funny looking back, as this was written back before the books were super big – back  before the movies were even in production. Now, there’s about a million stories to be found on this subject of adults getting into Harry Potter. I guess it isn’t all that innovative now.

News feature: Do you wanna dance?

This feature was so much fun to write and research. I pitched this to my editors at the Enquirer when I was an intern – it was pretty much right in the thick of the Dance Dance Revolution craze. I spent a lot of time with my sources, but I’m still pretty terrible at DDR.

The story was published as a Weekend magazine cover story Aug. 22, 2003.

Recommended reading for May 28th-June 2nd

These are my recommended links for May 28th through June 2nd:

  • 10 Must-Haves for Your Social Media Policy – As always, Mashable pulls together the tips that can help us all – individuals or businesses and news orgs – better develop our social media strategies.
  • Keyword Streamgraphs on Twitter – This site creates a visualization of the last 1000 tweets on a certain keyword. It doesn’t really make anything useful data-wise, but it is a great little thing you can link to out of your coverage of an issue or to track your buzz on an ongoing story. Mine is made for mapping who mentions “Reds” – but you can change the link to be any keyword.
  • How to Mine Twitter for Information – Great tips on getting data from Twitter to track buzzwords and trends over time.
  • Collaborative Reporting Tools | Publish2 – This new offering from Publish2 – which is a great tool if you haven’t used it – can be used in a lot of ways. It can be used to gather news tips, crowdsource stories and allow multiple people to contribute to reporting.
  • JournoTwit – The twitter client that’s not just for journalists… – This tool is still in development, but it has great potential. It is similar too, though not as good as, Tweetdeck – only online-based. If you could make the columns customizable, I’d be switching today.
  • Journalism.co.uk : BBC double-checks journalists’ ‘professional’ tweets – I guarantee there are reporters and editor that read this and think, “What a great idea!” No, it isn’t. Twitter is “right now” – not “ten minutes from now.” If you need an editor to make sure your tweets don’t have libel, spelling or factual error, you shouldn’t be tweeting. Period.
  • Commentary: Why Twitter won’t save journalism or kill it | McClatchy – A fairly honest overview of Twitter from someone who isn’t “in the tank” like me. While I think it is short-sighted to say Twitter won’t revolutionize journalism (maybe not Twitter – but something like it can and will), it’s at least giving the service a shot.

Recommended reading for April 24th through May 5th

These are my recommended links for April 24th through May 5th:

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