"On ne saurait faire une omelette sans casser des oeufs" — Count Peter Palen before the murder of emperor Paul of Russia (1801)
Joy in your In Box
Subscribe via RSS, you geek
Get ALL the comments
Last month a large and boisterous fire appeared on the rooftop gardens of a Toronto waterfront condo during the afternoon rush hour. Bright orange flame pierced thick black smoke, and the wind-whipped plume was so large and so high it was visible from clear across Lake Ontario, in St. Catherine’s, 51 kms to the south. Thousands of workers in the downtown towers gawked at the fire from their windows, commuter traffic slowed to a crawl along the elevated expressway mere metres from the fire-struck condo. On the islands and ferries and boats in the harbour, all
Continue reading Breaking News: The Top 5 mistakes newspaper make when news happens
This week I teamed up with an old colleague, Steve Buist of the Hamilton Spectator, to spend a half day or so with editorial staff from the Metroland West community newspapers at their annual Editorial Training Day. Steve spent an hour and a half offering a highly personalized tour of the web tools he relies on for his – need I say it? – award-winning investigative reporting, with a focus on online court and government documents and databases. Steve has garnered multiple National Newspaper Awards and nominations for his work on topics like the food we eat (A Pig’s
Continue reading Going where your audience is (and newspapers mostly aren’t)
I originally developed this web writing checklist for my Writing for the Web class in WebU, but am reposting it here today because I’m giving a short seminar on this topic here at the Star. Additionally, one of the best resources for Writing for the Web has to be Jacob Nilson’s collection of posts on the topic at Useit.com Here are seven ways to get the most out of the web when publishing a story. Stop before posting ANY story and ask how you can enrich it for the reader: 1) Are there original documents you can link to?
Continue reading Seven Ways to Write Like a Digital Native
It’s Wordstock time again. It’s probably Canada’s longest-running annual professional development day for journalists and I got a chance to host two workshops – a panel on place blogging with David Topping of Toronto.ist and Tim Shore of Blog.To and the perennial Top Tools workshop. I felt pretty ambivalent about the Top Tools piece – I mean, who doesn’t already have a toolbox crammed to overflowing with useful, cool and free tools? I felt that way last year too when I did it, but my audience surprised me by being large and enthusiastic. And it quickly became obvious that
Continue reading The Top 1,002 Internet Tools for Journalists
There was a big turnout for Wordstock, the annual journalism conference held at Ryerson University’s School of Journalism in Toronto this past weekend, an encouraging sign in troubled times. Attendees seemed about evenly split between working, full-time journalists, and freelancers, and students. After a morning keynote (which I was lucky enough to deliver) the day was divided into three sessions offering 5 different workshops in each – a pretty jam-packed day. In addition to the keynote, I ran sessions on Blogging (jointly with Spec city hall blogger, Nicole Macintyre) and internet tools.
I’ve already posted my slides from the
Continue reading Top 27 (or so) Internet Tools for Journalists
Please accept my apologies for the hiatus — I spent two glorious weeks on-vacation and off-line at a cottage beside a small black mountain lake in the Laurentians and then returned and jumped into a brand new role with my paper and our chain (TorStar). For the next long while I’ll be part of a core team building, installing and training staff on a brand new (massive) content management system that will create a common, chain-wide newsroom. Of a sort. It’s an exciting and challenging job and as a bonus it means I don’t have to commute. (Cue the
Continue reading New Job – New Blog Coming
Here’s probably the key lesson I learned from closely watching the Toronto media race to cover Sunday morning’s propane depot blast, a breaking news story that killed two, destroyed five homes and rendered 10,000 people temporarily homeless:
Speed of delivery ain’t the biggest change the web brings to the news game – duration is.The story lives in time, and your job changes as you move further away in time from the event.
This was not the case in the days of the 2x daily newscast and 1X daily press run: breaking news happened, we scrambled like hell to gather as
Continue reading What the propane depot explostions taught me about coverning breaking news on the web
Last month I was invited to speak at the Mags University, an annual conference for Canadian Magazines, to offer a Digital Survival Guide for Editors. I blogged about it including posting my presentation slides and appropritate links back in June. After the session one of my hosts, Stan Sutter, a journalist with, among other things, a long history at Marketing Magazine, approached me and asked if I’d sit (stand, actually) for a video interview for his own blog.
He used a simple Cannon (I think) point and shoot, urged me to be brief and to-the-point, asked me couple
Continue reading My four step plan on becoming a digital journalist – boiled down to a 90 sec video
During these summer months WebU is offering a series of "grad" courses – shorter, sharper sessions aimed at specific constituencies: photographers, ad sales reps, editorial writers etc. One of these sessions is for the Metroland web "masters", the folks responsible for the editorial content of our web sites. For that session It thought it would be fun to try out the Coveritlive live blogging tool, which was created by a team in Toronto, just down the highway. Here it is:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Canada License.Powered by WordPress & the Atahualpa Theme by BytesForAll. Discuss on our WP Forum