About

I grew up loving technology.

I was lucky. We lived out in the country, right on the border of Loveland and Milford, far away from modern technology. We lived next down the road from the Shriner’s Oasis, where they held the Bill Goodman Gun & Knife show once a month. Occasionally, the cows would get loose around the area and we’d see one.

Somehow, though, my mom and dad had the foresight to buy me a computer when I was 12. The damn thing didn’t have any software, with the exception of a word processor with no spell check. They also bought me a dot-matrix printer and — if memory serves me correctly — a 1200 baud modem.

Then, as my dad said: “We didn’t even help you take it out of the box.”

I was too young to know any better, so I started tinkering. Twenty-three years later, I’m thrilled that I did.

Eventually, I made my way as a journalist. I did what lots of young journalists do. I got a job at a weekly, Cincinnati Citybeat, and wrote about city government and pop culture (not together though).

The first story I ever wrote was about Jim Carroll and Hunter S. Thompson, who happened to be in Louisville for a poetry event. My story was so bad, it never saw the light of day. (A year later, I met Carroll again and I happened in on an interview with Jimi Hendrix parents — how could I possibly not love journalism.)

Eventually I made my way to Austin — I forgot what happened there — before landing at the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley, just as they were adding some new media components to the school.

I worked at Conde Nast’s Wired during the day, and did Berkeley at night. When I graduated, I moved to Wired News, the online, daily version of the magazine. I was hooked on new media by then. We did weekly audio news casts. I did a weekly downloaded radio show. I covered culture and entertainment.

I was in the court room for the Napster trial. I’ve sat in Congressmans’ offices discussing copyright. I’ve met digerati worth millions who could be my younger, slightly less handsome brothers.

I wrote at Wired and Wired News during the boom and the bust. It was awesome.

Eventually, I settled back in Austin and co-authored a book, Dungeons and Dreamers, with John Borland. But the wanderlust struck and I found myself working at MIT’s Technology Review, building an online, daily news operation.

Fun? Let’s just say I lived through interesting times.

We did it though, and I’m proud to say that they’ve grown and morphed into a very cool company. I have good friends there, and fond memories.

In 2006, I left the world of journalism for the chance to build a technology and storytelling program called Media Informatics at Northern Kentucky University, not too far from that little country town where I grew up. Of course, that little country town is now a little metropolis. Apparently, land was cheap. I also wr0te daily technology news for the ECT News Network.

In 2009, I took a job at Ball State University, in Muncie, Indiana, teaching journalism, social media and digital storytelling. I’m also an Emerging Media Fellow, which means I’ll be working with both my department and Fellows from other departments to recommend specific technologies that can be used for specific problems.

Mostly, though, I spend my time thinking about storytelling and technology. This blog is about the fundamental disconnect between traditional media and modern technology. The disconnect between the ways we used to tell stories and the ways we can tell stories now.

Before I step aside, though, there’s one more point I want to make: nowhere on this blog will you see me argue for the death of any type of storytelling. That doesn’t mean I won’t argue that, for instance, newspapers should die. I will argue that. But it doesn’t mean that I believe journalism will die. Simply that it will be something new.

I hope you find the blog as enjoyable to read as it is to work on it.