For the past three months, I have been working on major projects as a special advisor to the School of Communication at American University here in Washington D.C. and as journalist-in-residence for the Knight Center for International Media within the School of Communication at the University of Miami.

Enthusiasm and dynamic, focused discussions marked last week’s Online News Association09 Conference and Awards Ceremony in San Francisco, in sharp contrast to other gatherings of journalists that I have attended this year. One might say it almost seemed like “irrational exuberance.”

I am a big fan of the use of direct field observations to help stimulate new product innovations; a technique embraced by firms such as Ideo.

To that end, I have recently been watching my college-bound daughter and her friends interact as they all experience the beginning of their freshman year. Their media choices and media consumption patterns are particularly relevant to me as they are harbingers of a future that will be shaped by the habits of the first generation of “digital natives.”

As I regroup after several weeks of personal and professional travel, I wanted to address an interesting question that was raised recently as I was doing a live discussion on video journalism for knowledgewebb.net.

After attending last week’s AEJMC conference, I spent some time this week reviewing notes drawn from interesting blog posts and presentations encountered over the past year.

I was drawn back to a keynote presentation given by Jane McGonigal to the SXSW Interactive Conference in Austin in March, 2008.

Working in Prague on July 4th with college students on a cross-cultural multimedia project, I think about the future of journalism in the United States.  The aspirations of our Founding Fathers were encoded in key documents like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Among our cherished freedoms, articulated in the [...]

Pondering the need to reinvent journalism in the digital age, I keep coming back to a working definition offered in a slightly different context by Don Norman in his book “Things That Make Us Smart.” Talking about the importance of stories, he wrote, ”…Stories are important cognitive events, for they encapsulate in a compact, efficient [...]

This past weekend, Susan Boyle competed in the finals of Britain’s Got Talent and came in second ultimately to the street dance troupe Diversity, despite winning the hearts of judges Piers Morgan, Amanda Holden, and Simon Cowell.  Her lifelong interest in singing led up to her decision  to enter the competition, leaving the tiny Scotland village of [...]