Traditional American values

Submitted by yelvington on July 4, 2014 - 11:49am

It is the Fourth of July, Independence Day in the United States, a day when we dress up in red/white/blue outfits, eat hot dogs and barbecue, and set off small explosives. It also is a day for pontificating about what it is to be an American. We don't really need a special day for that, as we now are in a state of continuous political campaigning and under a barrage of propaganda from our "deregulated" broadcasting industry.

The episode in which I cause the sky to fall on journalism as we know it

Submitted by yelvington on April 18, 2014 - 3:05pm

I was part of a panel discussion of metrics and analytics in the newsroom a couple of weeks ago at the Journalism Interactive conference at the University of Maryland. I approached the subject with some trepidation. Some journalists are resistant to the very idea of measurement, often downright innumerate, and sometimes hostile to any idea that doesn't lead us all back into the honey and clover of the 1980s, before the Internet came along and turned it all into snakes and bees.

Milepost 20

Submitted by yelvington on April 2, 2014 - 12:53pm

I passed another milepost yesterday. April 1 was my 20th anniversary in digital media. I moved from the print newsroom of the Star Tribune on April 1, 1994, found a desk in the tech office, and started noodling on a website prototype on a Mac Quadra.

Spotted gets a new framework

Submitted by yelvington on March 5, 2014 - 3:02pm

Back in the last decade we created a community photo-sharing platform called Spotted. The original idea was borrowed from a simple, successful content/marketing program at Cox Interactive Media, where I was executive editor at the turn of the century. We sent someone with a digital camera to an event with instructions to turn around and shoot the spectators, and hand out business cards. The resulting slideshows were huge traffic generators.

Didn't mean to quit blogging

Submitted by yelvington on March 5, 2014 - 1:41pm
I didn't mean to quit blogging, but I've been busy at work and living in two cities. And honestly, I've grown tired of the old pointless debates: free or paid? is the Internet the end of journalism or a new beginning? and so forth. Twitter has displaced blogging of the "blurb and link" variety, and Facebook has displaced blogging of the "I just want to express myself" flavor. I think that narrows the purpose of a blog, but it does not eliminate it. Maybe I'll do some more, now that I hacked my way past a forgotten password problem.