dan oshinsky dot com: A blog about journalism. And my mother.

Since April, I’ve been working on an experiment for my Twitter feed: I start each day with a bit of #AMinspiration, and I close each day with a #closingthought. A few weeks back, I expanded the latter, and started running #closingthought weeks. I had one inspired by Beatles songs. Another one featured overly-existential 90s pop (…)

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 (…)

Maybe this shouldn’t come as a surprise, as I have sent out upwards of 3,000 tweets, but I actually like Twitter. It’s one of the first things I check in the morning. It’s one of my best sources of political and sports news. It’s where I go to find time-wasters and, occasionally, good news stories (…)

Here’s where I stand: This morning, Twitter went down. Later in the morning, I went to tweet an interesting story about Twitter going down. Only Twitter was down, so I couldn’t post the story about Twitter being down. Now hundreds of my followers are unable to read a story about Twitter being down because Twitter (…)

In April, I wrote a blog post in which I suggested that “we, as Americans, are quickly becoming less interesting. Naturally, I would like to blame Twitter for this decline.” The diagnosis was simple: as Twitter allows us entry into the lives of friends and loved ones, we’re seeing thoughts both mundane and profound in (…)