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

There is a lot of frustration in the news industry right now. We have this amazing distribution system called the web. We’re entering a golden age of storytelling. Every year, more and more people are taking time for stories. And we’re still not making money. But consider the following: Peter Durand patented the tin can (…)

I got asked to speak to a class of business students about two weeks ago. The students were all upperclassmen, all entrepreneurial-minded. I talked about learning how to adjust to life after college, and then we got into the Q&A. One student asked me if I had any heroes in journalism. “I’m not going to (…)

You’re a newspaper. You’re looking for a way to tell an interesting story, to engage users and make $50,000. Quick: How do you pull it off? I’m thinking about calling up the team at Quarterly. It’s a new subscription service for interesting people and brands. Alexis Madrigal of the Atlantic, Gretchen Rubin at the Happiness (…)

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 (…)

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 (…)

Forbes ran a story on their website this week about Best Buy. The lead paragraph read: “Electronics retailer Best Buy is headed for the exits. I can’t say when exactly, but my guess is that it’s only a matter of time, maybe a few more years.” Then it went on to detail numerous problems with (…)

I was in New York City last week, and I went shopping with a friend. Or, more accurately: She went shopping, and I came along to try on funny hats and annoy her. Nevertheless: She took us to a store north of Columbus Circle. I’d never heard of the store before. It was called Century (…)

In 2002, the company that measures how many people watch television decided to do something experimental: They started measuring how many viewers were watching TV shows via something called TiVo, a personal recording device that had come to market three years earlier. Nielsen Media Research, the ratings company, had been measuring TV ratings since the (…)

I spent the weekend at NewsFoo, this unconference out in Phoenix. It’s a strange affair: The organizers — O’Reilly Media, the Knight Foundation and Google — handpick about 150 people involved in all corners of news, and they throw them in a building together for a weekend. There aren’t any sessions planned out in advance. (…)

Up front, I should say: I am not a great networker. Not yet. This goes back a long way, but the short version is: Sometime around the 6th grade, I realized that I was terrifyingly shy. Calling a friend to ask, “Hey, you wanna play basketball up at school?” was a Herculean ordeal. I remember (…)