Being a Knight-Mozilla Fellow ruined my life. My fellowship ended three months ago; I still don't have a job, my wife and I haven't spoken in days, and none of my friends take me seriously. There is only one piece of advice that I have for anybody considering applying: ignore all the obvious reasons why […]
This post is about my quest to answer the question “why are we building this from scratch?” It’s about observed realities regarding cross-newsroom collaboration, insights from upper management of The New York Times, and some major hurdles for open source in legacy media organizations. Prepare to explore the deep, dark, and relatively unspoken depths of […]
I made something awesome last week: Opened Captions. At face value it just looks like a live feed of C-SPAN’s Closed Captions. This alone is actually pretty cool if you think about it, especially if you are a deaf political junkie who sits far away from the TV and can’t read the closed captions. Of […]
Uh oh… I need to write a post about the Knight-Mozilla Fellowship and Chris Marstall already masterfully captured all my points last week! Thank goodness there are still a million reasons why OpenNews is awesome. By now you may have read four different accounts of my program, but if you make it through this one […]
I just finished the second week of my fellowship at The Boston Globe, so at this point I have a stronger sense of how things are done and where I might fit in. Having just come from an academic program like the MIT Media Lab there is a tinge of culture shock (for instance, everyone […]
This was my first week at my brand new job as a Knight-Mozilla Fellow and I can tell you already that it is going to be an awesome time. I’ve worked in a newsroom once before, as an intern in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette back during my undergraduate years, but I have a lot to learn […]
Last. Week. Was. Awesome. I just got back from a trip to Berlin as part of the Knight-Mozilla learning lab (MoJo). Twenty of the participants from the previous round (the month long lecture series) were invited to spend a week in Germany getting to know each other while attempting to churn out some code for […]
ATTN-SPAN is my hopeful attempt to have my cake and eat it too. Don’t let MoJo or MIT fool you: I’m making it for myself. The idea behind this project is that most content out there is a product that was created for the masses – not for me. I can find algorithms and editors […]
I have two new missions for the week: become an HTML5 and CSS3 guru, and go back to make sure my projects on github (there aren’t many at the moment) are well organized. These goals were both inspired by three recently acquired heroes of mine: Chris Heilmann, John Resig, and Jesse James Garret — all […]
It’s an incredibly humbling experience to sit down with your best ideas and crank out something quick and dirty for the world to see. In order to make something, you have to get your head out of the clouds and come careening down to earth. I knew this coming into the Media Lab, and quite […]