IT Fluency for Journalists

Written by Ryan Thornburg February 11, 2009 11:00 am EST No comments

Dan Gillmor’s recent blog post about the future of journalism education — particularly collegiate schools of journalism — is highlighting once again what is perhaps the most popular debate in our field. The question revolves basically around this: How much technology do journalists need to know?

Bootcamp: Data Driven Journalism

Written by Ryan Thornburg February 3, 2009 6:23 am EST No comments

So much of the training and retraining of journalists seems to be focused on getting them to be multimedia reporters, backpack journalists or one of the other buzzwords we use for collecting audio and visual content and presenting it online.

Multimedia is one of three things that make online journalism different from offline journalism, but the other two things — interactivity and user-control — depend largely on journalists understanding data driven journalism. This isn’t about numbers, but about structured data. Here’s a bootcamp that’s intended to introduce journalists to the tools and concepts of structured data and data driven journalism.

Win $1M the Holovaty Way

Written by Ryan Thornburg April 10, 2008 8:45 am EDT No comments

In Just Seven Easy Steps

For anyone who has ever been to an online journalism conference, you know Adrian Holovaty. He’s either on a panel, winning an award or being referenced by newsroom mangers, usually with some phrase similar to “we need more people like Adrian Holovaty”