dan oshinsky dot com: A blog about journalism. And my mother.

Since April, I’ve been working on an experiment for my Twitter feed: I start each day with a bit of #AMinspiration, and I close each day with a #closingthought. A few weeks back, I expanded the latter, and started running #closingthought weeks. I had one inspired by Beatles songs. Another one featured overly-existential 90s pop (…)

This is the shortest of these posts, if only because it’s more of a pep talk than anything, and because it deserves to be brief. Your newsroom is shrinking. Your newsroom cannot deliver all the news it wants to deliver. So find a partner. Make it an exclusive deal or use the Publish2 newswire to (…)

When I was in elementary school, I spent a lot of time watching infomercials. This wasn’t by choice; my family had yet to subscribe to cable, and Saturday morning cartoons always came on after infomercials. So I’ve been well-schooled in the nature of the TV pitch: the Total Gym, the Ronco Rotisserie, the Unbreakable Auto-Lock. (…)

There’s this funny little joke going around right now that there’s such a thing as a social media expert. These are people who boast advanced skills in the way of Twitter. They’ll teach you how to DM and build a fan page with the best of them. But what’s so funny is that technically, there’s (…)

What does a newsroom look like? The thing that’s probably coming to mind is something out of “All the President’s Men”: a large room, with long rows of cubicles stretching out into the distance. Which is a fine thought — a normal thought, really — because most newsrooms still look like that. Except for one (…)

In the fall of 2005, I entered college. At the time, the following things were true: Facebook was available only to those with a college email address. Photos could only be uploaded in the form of a profile picture. YouTube was just six months old, and it had yet to make a splash nationally. WiFi (…)

“It seems to take a very unique combination of technology, talent, business and marketing and luck to make significant change in our industry. It hasn’t happened that often.” That’s Steve Jobs in a 1994 interview with Rolling Stone. He’s talking about personal computing, but he might as well be discussing the state of journalism in (…)

I’ve been working on an extended journalism-related blog series that will launch tomorrow, and I worked up a little logo for the series. But in the process, I decided that the old logo for the occasional “Things Journalists Can Learn From…” series wasn’t cutting it. So I put Photoshop to work(1) and came out with (…)

Two different airlines announced an incredible deal yesterday: for $500, the buyer can fly anywhere the airline flies, with unlimited flights, for one month. This made a big splash, obviously, in the news. But I found out about it first through Twitter. One of the airlines offering the sale is JetBlue, who frequently pushes exclusive (…)

They said it couldn’t be done.(1) They said it shouldn’t be done, really. They said I would have to be an idiot to quit my paying job in San Antonio, move to Biloxi, Miss., and start my own news bureau. They said that I should find a more enjoyable way to blow my savings. I (…)