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

The catchphrase at Stry last year was simple: Stry covers undercovered issues in undercovered areas. And any time I mentioned that line, I brought up another. It’s from a conversation I had with a local when I was down in Biloxi last year, covering the aftermath of Katrina. We were talking about local issues, and (…)

I went to see NBC News’ David Gregory speak tonight in a little auditorium on Nantucket Island. He spoke for an hour, mostly about the failures of our political system and our economy and our media, and then he closed by reminding everyone that we were on a little island 30 miles off the coast (…)

Here is what happens when I hear about news indirectly — basically, when breaking news gets to me secondhand: 1. I run to a computer. 2. I open up the nearest Twitter client. 3. I search for the news that I’ve just heard and try to find confirmation that it is either true or false. In (…)

A week ago, Mizzou’s men’s basketball coach, Mike Anderson, left to take the same position at Arkansas. And in the past week, there’s been a lot of speculation about who will become my alma mater’s new head coach. Mizzou went hard after Purdue’s coach, Matt Painter. Today, it looked like MU was going to sign (…)

All Things D brings word today that Facebook will soon be loaning its commenting system to major media players. For those who believe that commentating systems that use real names — and therefore add some sort of accountability and transparency to the commenting process — are more likely to limit trolls, this seems like a (…)

I’ve been spending my week down in St. Petersburg, Fla., at the Poynter Institute. The theme of the week: entrepreneurial journalism. And after seeing case study after case study about successful journalism start-ups, I’m starting to see three common areas of overlap during the initial start-up process. Those areas are: Conceptualization –> Validation –> Realization (…)

The big news out today is that Reuters is going after the AP. Their new service, called Reuters America, intends to produce “Tier 2 domestic US news” with “one-person bureau chiefs,” with news “tailored to the needs of the US consumer media domestic audience.” Which means they’re sending one-man bands into under-served markets and selling (…)

Funny how some things are cyclical. Again, I’m hearing reporters question whether or not there’s money to be made in journalism. And again, I’m wondering why reporters feel the need to undermine themselves. Why not just come up with an explanation for why your job is essential to our democracy? Why not say something like (…)

I took the week off from Twitter last week. Not with any real purpose in mind, really. I just didn’t want to tweet, and I thought that maybe, it’d open up some free time for me to read the paper or be productive. But it didn’t. I kept checking Twitter — habitually. I keep reading (…)

There is a fad coming. The buzz inside journalism circles is that great reporting needs to be supported by multiple revenue streams. Walmart won’t support the Beijing bureau anymore, and a paywall might not either. Something else needs to fill in the funding gaps. Smaller news organizations are looking for their extra sources of revenue, (…)