dan oshinsky dot com: A blog about stories, storytelling... 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 (…)