Good. Better. Done. A blog about doing great 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 (…)

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 (…)

So this is the story of how I called three airline customer care numbers in one night — and then Zappos. And then I understood. Now, I don’t recommend calling multiple airline customer care hotlines within the span of an hour. They’ll make you mad. At the first airline, it took me 15 minutes to (…)

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 (…)

You knew it was coming, eventually: the Social Media News at 6. (To be followed soon by the Hyperlocal News at 6.) Dallas’ KDFW has the story: (H/T to NPR’s Andy Carvin for the link.)

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, (…)