Rough Drafts

The haiku and micropoetry journal I edit, tinywords, got 875 submissions in the course of 2 weeks for our upcoming summer issue. Since I expect I’ll be able to publish about 50 or 60 poems in this issue, that means the acceptance rate is going to be significantly less than 10%. It also means I […]

Apple announced the iPad Wednesday, and with it added e-books to the menu of content it’s selling via iTunes. But I can’t believe that Steve Jobs is going to stop there. Brian X. Chen and I predicted on Tuesday evening that Apple’s big announcement would go beyond the iPad, and include the announcem

Ten years ago today, I was in the middle of trying to get a content syndication startup off the ground. I’d just left InfoWorld, where I had a cushy gig as a columnist and content development editor. In six months, the startup would be dead and I’d be back to journalism, this time as a […]

From my own experience, and the experience of friends who had spent months to years to a lifetime devoted to little magazines and small presses, I knew in my bones that tinywords had become overwhelming. This stuff eats you alive. But I also knew, it’s damn hard to let go once you made your mark. […

A couple of weeks ago I took part in a discussion about press embargoes, with Tom Foremski, Damon Darlin and Mark Glaser, skillfully moderated by Sam Whitmore. Also in the audience, and contributing worthy comments, were Rafe Needleman, Paul Boutin, and other members of the press and PR corps. I kic

The collective intelligence poured into inventing new portable games over the past several centuries is equivalent, scientists estimate, to the outpouring of genius from a whole year’s worth of Nobel prize winners. Except instead of curing cancer, we’re making toys for kids who have trouble paying a

I’ll admit it: I got into journalism for the money. Columbia Journalism School dean Nicholas Lemann has said: “I’ve never met a single person in 35 years who went into journalism out of pure economic reason.” He never met me. While my motivation wasn’t purely financial, I’d be lying if I said that w

This is a hell of an obit about a man who must have been a hell of a writer. Not being a sports fan, I hadn’t heard about Bud Shrake until I read this, and now I’m sorry I missed him. I’m pretty sure they aren’t making journalists like this any more. Sally Jenkins – […]

As the publishing industry collapses, it’s becoming clear that both journalists and public relations people need to change the way they work. Amazingly, it’s still possible to find journalists throwing hissy fits about email blasts or blacklisting PR people for showing insufficient deference. This k

If anyone doubted the power and importance of online social networks, the election of Barack Obama should have put that to rest. Much has been made of the Obama campaign’s use of the internet as an organizing, fundraising and marketing tool. The core of that strategy was a social network, MyBarackOb

Imagine that news stories and blog posts could be tied to a geographic area. If lots of news publishers and bloggers did this, you could: Search Google News for stories from a specific neighborhood, like “Hyde Park in Chicago,” or a general region, like “within 50 miles of Three Mile Island.” Find a

While I was on vacation, a feature story I wrote earlier in the month got published on Wired. It’s about the technological progress in CMOS imaging chips, and why the tech is making it possible, for the first time, to record video on a digital single-lens reflex camera. Photographers are really exci