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Author Archives: Amy Gahran

Amy Gahran is a media consultant, journalist, and editor based in Boulder, Colorado

What Reporters Can Learn from Product Pages

Journalists typically recoil at the thought of writing anything that resembles marketing copy — or even from thinking of news as a product. But we’re already long past the age when an established news brand was all you needed to determine the relevance and quality of news. If journalists truly believe the quality of their [...]

links for 2008-11-09

My Damn Channel » You Suck at Photoshop: Season 1 » You Suck at Photoshop #1
Educational videocast with a fun gimmick - teach who hates teaching
(tags: video podcast fun tutorials)

kirtsy / Popular
Apparently, a Digg for women. Looks kinda, hmmm, ummm, stereotyped & shallow… but i'll give it a deeper look later.
(tags: social+media women problems)

spy :: [...]

links for 2008-11-08

Web 2.0 Summit 2008 - O'Reilly Conferences, November 05 - 07, 2008, San Francisco, CA
I ***SO*** wish I was at this conference today….. Watching it on Twitter (#web2summit), looks great.
(tags: conferences events media technology media+evolution)

About the Lab » Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism
"The Nieman Journalism Lab is an [...]

Beat journalists: Best online tools?

Today, Milwaukee Sentinel art & architecture critic Mary Louise Schumacher put out this video call on Seesmic asking beat reporters to recommend their favorite online tools:
Beat Bloggers: Lend us your tips!
Please respond to her post!
Here’s my response, where just off the top of my head I recommend geotagging & geodata (especially for environmental reporters), [...]

Blogging: Every word counts

On Sunday morning, from 10:45-noon MT, I’ll be speaking in Denver at the Thin Air Summit. (Twitter hashtag: #TAS08) It’s a new conference on new media that I hope will become an annual affair. A lot of intriguing new media people and companies live and work along Colorado’s Front Range. We’ve really needed our [...]

Why CNN’s pseudo “hologram” was such a bad idea

Someone might want to tell CNN: TV is a two-dimensional medium. Holograms don’t work there — not even in high-definition. That’s even more true for holograms that aren’t really holograms.
On election night, CNN debuted a new type of eye candy into its coverage: three-dimensional video interviews with reporter Jessica Yellin and rapper Will.I.Am, both speaking [...]

Future of Journalism Webcast: My Twitter Coverage

On Oct. 28, the 100-year-old Christian Science Monitor sent shockwaves through the news business when it announced that in April 2009 it will switch from daily to weekly print publication, and invest more resources in its online operations. (Poynter coverage by Rick Edmonds.)
This set some pretty interesting context for the Future of Journalism panel discussion [...]

links for 2008-11-07

FIXYOURTHINKING.COM: Tool/Tip: RecordMyCalls.com
"Want to record your Phone Calls on your iPhone? Want to possibly skirt some state laws concerning phone call recording? The other i saw an ad for RecordMyCalls.com. I checked it out and found it to be a GREAT resource for future use. There are two ways you could use this with your [...]

Naked Pumpkin Runner Hearings: Dec 17 and Jan 12

One nice thing about our legal system is that, with a few exceptions, arraignment hearings are public. Anyone — even you! — can attend and observe. Simply having extra eyeballs present in the courtroom, just watching, can encourage judges, lawyers, and cops to apply extra care and common sense in the legal process.
This is why, [...]

Letters to the Editor Blog: Why didn’t you just say so?…

One of the things I’ve liked about Boulder’s Daily Camera is that on their site they run an unfiltered Letters to the Editor blog. Unlike the letters that get published in the print edition, every letter the Camera receives gets posted to this blog — where (unlike comments left on Camera articles) they can be [...]