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

Thanks to Storify for the assistance with posting all of those tweets.

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 (…)

Two different airlines announced an incredible deal yesterday: for $500, the buyer can fly anywhere the airline flies, with unlimited flights, for one month. This made a big splash, obviously, in the news. But I found out about it first through Twitter. One of the airlines offering the sale is JetBlue, who frequently pushes exclusive (…)

In 1999, in an attempt to defeat the morning ratings Cerberus that was Katie Couric, Matt Lauer and Al Roker, ABC countered with an unusual move: They built a studio in Times Square. If you’ve been to Times Square in the last decade, you know which one I’m talking about. Other networks have studios there, (…)

About a month ago, I started writing a blog post that I never finished. It was about Dunbar’s Number, which explains a simple human limitation: we can only really care about so many people. Dunbar puts a limit on it: 150. But thanks to Facebook and Twitter, we’re more easily connected to others than ever (…)