dan oshinsky dot com: A blog about stories, storytelling... and my mother.

“People change. Circumstances change. Legal documents don’t change.” — Brent Beshore, CEO of AdVentures At my first job out of college, I was told that I would get health care. Dental, medical — the usual. This sounded good to me, even though I didn’t know what a co-pay was, or a deductible, or anything else (…)

I’ve gotten dozens of excellent responses to my Puta Grande talk. But my favorite was passed along to me from a cousin on the west coast. She sent the video to her friend, a mother of four, and that mom emailed back to say, Oh, this is nothing. When our family picks up someone at (…)

Things tend to go wrong. This is a series of blog posts about the things I think about during those moments when the wrong things happen. In 2008, I studied abroad in Spain. It wasn’t necessarily the most challenging academic experience of my life. The school where I took classes had palm trees on campus. (…)

There was a point not all that long ago when I was pretty sure I could codify entrepreneurship. I’d heard plenty of stories, and talked to plenty of entrepreneurs, and I was seeing a lot of the same themes repeat. I thought that if I could just ID specific points along the way, I could (…)

The PhD with whom I share an office wall at RJI just published a cool study on how readers react when they stumble across news. In it, she makes a number of really interesting points about serendipity and the news. And before I go any further, I want to say this: Many of the points (…)

So this is the story about how back in 2004, something happened on Martin Luther King Day that changed my life. Actually, it wasn’t exactly MLK Day. It was the Friday before. Every year, my synagogue in D.C. holds a big interfaith service. Religious leaders from across the city come, and choirs sing, and there’s (…)

Back on Aug. 1, 2010, I officially launched Stry. I was a month into my three-month stay in Biloxi. I wasn’t making any money, and I wasn’t really sure what was going to happen to me. That night, I wrote down this thought about my future. I’m sharing it here on the Interwebs for the (…)

If you missed Part I of “What the Hell Do I Do Now With Stry?”, you might want to read that first. So the question for me now is, With what I know right now, what the hell do I really want to do with Stry? Financially, I’m alright. I have +/-$45,000 left to spend (…)

This is Part I of II. Skip ahead to Part II if you’d like using this very link. 18 months ago, I was working at a TV station in San Antonio. I saw that journalism was changing, and I knew I wasn’t a part of the conversation. Every time I saw an interview with a (…)

Back in December, I went out to Phoenix for NewsFoo, a conference for 150 of the brightest minds in news. I’m not sure why I was invited; my guess is that I was there to keep the group’s average IQ from skewing too high. Regardless: I was there, and at the conference, I got to (…)