On open news budgets

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Making Your News Budget Public: How And Why – I feel like I’ve been talking about open news for years and years. Back then, I referred to it as “making your editorial calendar public,” but now that I’m an old fart in a newsroom, I say “open your news budget.” Same diff. My latest post at 10,000 Words outlines examples of a few news orgs who are actually doing it – finally. Some use Facebook, others use Twitter, some are writing straight-up blog posts and others are using Google Spreadsheets. More later today on how The Seattle Times is approaching this concept.

On deciding to dedicate time to a new storytelling tool

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Tools come and go. We blog about them all the time as they crop up. We poke around, make accounts that quickly expire. We wait for platforms to fall out of beta, but forget about them by the time they go public. We claim that some tools are the “future of [fill in the blank]” or the next “[social media tool A] meets [social media tool B].” So how do you decide which ones are worth your newsroom’s time? These are a few of my thought processes. Continue reading →

The future of video in online journalism

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Predicting the future of anything is tough, especially in online journalism and certainly when it comes to video. I remember a time when “multimedia” was everything at conferences and in j-school classrooms. Those days faded and were replaced with “social media.” Now it’s all about data and applications.

My point is that discussion about the “future” of online video has really faded into the background in forward-thinking journalism circles. I certainly don’t know what that future looks like, but as both a consumer and producer, I can make a few guesses based on my personal expectations.  Continue reading →

Inside the Seattle Times’ basement

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This morning I ventured into the Seattle Times “press room,” which I expected to be a room for press conferences. But, nope. It was the other kind of press room, where they actually printed the paper years ago. The whole experience was like entering a time capsule back to 1994. Everything was untouched, as though everyone got up and left, never to look back.

There was still ink in the canisters and open log books with pens sitting atop. There were even coats and gloves in the lockers. An eerie place.

It’s so strange that an entire floor of a building with levels of heavy machinery and dozens of workers was required to publish a piece of content, and today all I have to do is click a pretty blue button.

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An ode to George Ramos

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He was always proud to say that his Cal Poly class ring said both “BS” and “’69″ — and he wasn’t afraid to make an inappropriate joke about it in front of 60 parents at graduation.

October 2006. George talks to Granite Hills High School journalism students about the Mustang Daily, Cal Poly's student newspaper.

George Ramos was never afraid to show his true colors — even in what should have been a very official, professional role as Department Chair of the Cal Poly journalism department. He was a riot. He was sometimes inappropriate. He cursed a lot. But he knew his shit, and he knew it well.

It’s funny, maybe ironic, that I’m sitting down to write a blog post about the death of George Ramos — the very man who taught me how to write obituaries.

But this post isn’t so much an obituary as it is an ode to all George Ramos did to shape me into the person I am today. It’s an ode that I think will resonate with those students who knew him as a professor and editor. So, let’s start at the beginning. Continue reading →

AP’s new “linking” policy is not real innovation

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And in an act of irony, I’m duplicating my efforts and re-posting this on my personal blog. I, unlike the AP, though, am inline linking to the original source.
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If anything, the AP’s decision to start linking to original sources is a hindrance. Because now, in addition to news outlets everywhere reproducing the same exact stories, they will all include unlinked bit.ly URLs.

Trust me, I’m all for hyperlinking. It’s the fabric of the web, what makes the web functional, and I think more newspapers should be doing it — and more often. But what we have here is a technology problem and an ideology problem. I’m sure if the AP could write through stories using HTML (and, of course, have that HTML stripped once it hits the print CMS), they would do it. Or at least I hope they would.  But their solution of including bit.ly links — in parentheticals — isn’t the way to credit newspapers or drive traffic. Continue reading →

If your website is full of assholes…

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If your website’s full of assholes, it’s your fault. Anil Dash is spot on. Part of maintaining a news website is maintaining community and having high standards. He outlines five steps every website should take to keep their community in order. Because whether we like it or not, quality of our comments reflects on how our organizations are perceived, and the quality of comments that will come up moving forward.

A journalist’s life as an illegal immigrant

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My life as an undocumented immigrant. I finally had a chance to read this in full. It’s the first-hand account of a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has worked at The Washington Post, HuffPo, etc., who has taken extreme to keep his illegal status a secret, all the while reporting on the truth for high-profile publications. It hits a chord with me because so many of my Filipino family members came here, including my father, just about 25 years ago. Read it. And read WaPo’s response about why they didn’t publish it.

What I’ve been up to these past few weeks

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Phew, what a crazy three weeks it’s been!

I’m writing this post from Seattle, where I’ve now been officially living for a full week. Yesterday was my first day at The Times. Here are a few highlights about the move and about the job (following suit of Heather, who has been blogging about her first few days at WaPo).

It was the longest drive of my life. We (boyfriend and I) started in Santa Barbara. Spent four days in our hometown of Porterville, Calif., (four-hour drive) where we packed up the UHAUL with furniture from storage. Then did an eight-hour drive to Santa Rosa, where we stayed for a night to catch some shut-eye. Then, came the long haul, from Santa Rosa to Portland, which (coupled with gas stops, pit stops, nap stops, food stops) took 19 hours. Finally, we did the drive last Tuesday morning from Portland to Seattle, which only took four hours with the UHAUL. That puts us at a grand total of 35 hours of driving.