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

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 (…)

My startup songwriter-in-residence, Todd Snider, has a line that I find myself quoting a lot. It’s from a brilliant little song, titled “Easy Money.” He sings: Everyone wants the most they can possibly get For the least they can possibly do And he couldn’t be more spot on. I meet a lot of people who (…)

This is the kind of thing that I shouldn’t go doing. It’s not nice of me to take an old man’s money. And yet, that’s just what I intend to do. The old man in question just happens to be my old man, Bill Oshinsky (he’s the little fella you see in the photo below). (…)

A few weeks back, I was late for ONA10 in D.C. I had meant to get to a talk on APIs, but I missed the first subway ride down, and then I stopped for a bagel, and then I spotted David Cohn — he of Spot.us fame — and suddenly found myself even later. Because (…)

That’s the question I’m asking in a new project that will soon be launching over at BooksAround.org. It’s a spin-off on the old dollar bill experiment: if I send 100 interesting books out to people around the country, and ask those people to read and pass the books along to friends, where will those books (…)

In my three months in Biloxi, the question that’s been my “Do you play basketball?” is, “What’s your favorite story from down here?” I’ve been told of miracles and horrors, and I’ve become intimately familiar with the inner workings of both local government and insurance contracts. But my favorite story to write down here didn’t (…)

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 (…)

The first thought was that I was being pranked. Sure, I’d just written a fairly controversial column about why the Spurs should trade Tony Parker for Kens5.com. It had generated quite a few hits on our website, and I’d gotten plenty of e-mail feedback from readers about it. But a radio station in New York (…)