Hire Me: April 2009 Archives

I don't know about you, but it seems like I've been getting much, much more email lately. And much of it I actually asked to receive. Group updates from LinkedIn, Facebook messages, newsletters, marketing pitches, special offers... Oy. Any one of these items can have value, but in a 24-hour period, the pile can make me want to run from my computer, pour a nice cocktail and watch ANYTHING on TV. That's not always practical, however, especially at hours like this one, when it's not 5:00 anywhere I do business.

But using my Gmail, I started on a little endeavor to buffer myself from the crush over the past week and am already noticing the results.

Here's what I did.

First, I made a "pending" label, but I called it "__pending" so that it would stay at the top of my filter list.

Next, I grabbed the email address of an email that I have a passing interest in, but don't want to flood my inbox.

I clicked on "Create a Filter" near the search button near the top of the page.

I added said email address to the From field, and hit the Next Step button.

I then checked the box next to "Skip the Inbox (Archive it)" and chose __pending from the dropdown menu of available filters. This automatically checks the box.

I then hit the "Create Filter" button.

I have done this 44 times so far and my only regret is not doing this sooner. I love this method as opposed to automatically diverting different messages into different filters because I have a one-stop shop for lower-priority messages that I might have an interest in reading, when I decide I want to. Also, with as much as I'm checking messages on my phone these days, each time I can spare myself from scrolling past such a message is valuable time I don't have to waste getting to the "real" messages that I most benefit from catching and replying to on my mobile device.

Now if only someone at Google Labs could make a "skip inbox and add to my chosen tag" button ;-)

Onward and upward ...

No one has ever asked me to be a professor of whatever they call "journalism" online. But plenty of people have been asking me questions about various trends and technologies, and some of them are also teaching. I also had the great pleasure to work with some outstanding interns from Northeastern University over the past couple of years.

And of course, I've spent many years in and around journalism and think tanks and training institutes and non-profits that are attempting to educate.

So I got to thinking. If I were to teach a course on something resembling "online journalism" what would it look like? What would it cover? What are the essentials that people should enter the world with an understanding of so that great journalism can be done with the wonderful tools that I am fortunate enough to play with nearly every day?

This isn't everything I'd want to include, but they are some things I think are important. I encourage you to add yours as well.

And who knows? Maybe someone will read them, and think about them, and start teaching them. Dare to dream...

Wrangling RSS - Using Yahoo! Pipes to divine meaning from feeds

Geo Metro - Understanding how longitude, latitude and mapping technology can have an impact on readers

Twend reporting - Using tools like search.twitter.com to glean insight into the minds of the audience

Crowdsourcing investigations - Use the leverage of the audience to demand, and vet, answers

XBRL - Where online journalism means business

Flash - No. Not unless you REALLY need to. (One day session)

A Web of Ties - It's not just about your content on your web site, but about extending it online

Online video - Dos, don'ts and how and where to publish to have the biggest impact

I just read Robert Scoble's "The worst thing for Twitter" about how if Twitter got bought by IBM or Adobe or some such outfit that would be even worse for it than being bought by Google.

A wave of emotion rushed over me. And it had nothing to do with any of those potential suitors. It has to do with newspapers.

I haven't written much about the death of newspapers, as I think there is about as much of a saturated market on that angle as there are "Social Media Experts" on Twitter. I started working in newspapers, worked five years at The American Press Institute, ran the web site for every We Media conference, and went to the same school / worked at the same school newspaper as Jayson Blair. I know pretty intimately, the reasons for the death of newspapers.

I thought about an alternate universe where as an ultimate act of swinging for the fences, every newspaper got together and made a bold, expensive gamble similar to the $1.1 trillion Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, Lula Ignacio de Silva, Manmohan Singh, Hu Jintao and the rest of the G20 pledged to the International Monetary Fund yesterday.

The action I pictured for newspapers: Buying Twitter. In a consortium brokered by either the World Association of Newspapers  or the Newspaper Association of America. In early 2008. Or at least after Facebook was rebuffed.

I have for years lamented decisions, big and small, that were made by newspapers that adversely affected their bottom lines. From straightforward steps like creating easier interfaces for purchase images both breaking local events, as well as from a paper's archives, or learning the lessons of Craigslist and Monster.com  and applying those to their often awful relationships with funeral home directors to protect their lucrative obituaries section from outside threats. [Disclosure: during a stint as Sr. Editor, Obits and Fun at Eons, I helped build the precursor to Tributes.com and may or may not have shares in that spinoff.]

Some of these things wouldn't have cost a dime.

@chadrem