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

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 (…)

There’s this amazing moment in one of Carl Reiner’s and Mel Brooks’ “2000 Year Old Man” sketches, when Reiner is moving through a line of questions about the early days of man. He’ll get to the good stuff in a second — questions about Joan of Arc, questions about the secrets to longevity — but (…)

I’m sorry, because this doesn’t concern either journalism or my mother (1), but this is too much. At right, delirious Michigan fans are celebrating a win that happened just this afternoon over the University of Connecticut Huskies. Most years, a win over UConn would be a huge deal. But not this year. This year, UConn’s (…)

I’ve been gainfully employed for nearly four months, and I’m finally starting to understand a few truths about life inside a conglomerate. When you’re the new guy at a big company, the flowchart of power feels a little like one of those multi-piece Russian matryoshka dolls: you’d like to think you’re important, but if you were to (…)