The Cult of Me

How Social Technologies Will Save the Story

How News Orgs Are Turning to Staff, Technology & Users to Improve Comments

How News Orgs Are Turning to Staff, Technology & Users to Improve Comments.
I’m continually bothered by writers who discuss moderating comments as if this is something revolutionary. We’re more than 20 years into this in the digital landscape and yet writers, editors and reporters continue to act as if they have parsed out some answer [...]

Games, Journalism + SXSW 2010

One of the emerging memes at this year’s SXSW is the use of game mechanics in journalism. I’m glad. I’ve been pushing this particular meme both at SXSW Interactive through my Advisory Board role (most of this year’s panels I selected are ARG/Game/JOU related) and my writing.
In fact, The Cult of Me is largely [...]

3 Steps to Building a Distributed News Organization

I was talking with Glenn Platt, the director of the Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies at Miami (Oxford) University, about what a distributed news organization would look like today. He’s intrigued by my ideas and asked me a simple question: so what does this (functionally) look like.
Sans drawing paper, I couldn’t show him. But [...]

Trading on Influence

While I was in London, I had the opportunity to visit Joanna Geary at The London Times. We’d been trying to meet since South by Southwest Interactive and finally — FINALLY — we made that happen.
The Times, part of Rupert Murdoch’s empire, is doing what his other media properties are doing: searching for the new [...]

What Iran Is Teaching Us About Distributed Storytelling

For some time, I’ve had this sense that the ways in which we have been discussing “interactivity” when it comes to storytelling has been wrong.
In this little thought exercise, interactivity is short for anything that requires users to engage in some action, but an action that is limited by the tools provided by the storytellers. [...]

Why Interactive is a Very Bad Way Tell a News Story…

I’ve been contemplating a thought I had today during the final session of the b.tween conference here in Liverpool: there are two “types” of Web-centric stories, distributed and interactive.
The news business is working with interactive stories, which is a bad idea since it’s limiting and mainly used for branding purposes or tradition-type entertainment; distributed stories [...]

The Problem of Newspapers, Framed

It’s difficult to imagine a time in the near future when new software applications won’t be rolling off the digital assembly line, changing — or more likely making easier — our interactions with the cyber stream of information that is shaping the way we will live in the next, near future.
This is problematic for storytellers, [...]

Data Mapping on Memorial Day

It’s a somber time for our country, remembering those who have served and died in service to the country. Because there is such an outpouring of participation, there are some interesting stories and data maps being created today.
It’s also a good example of what can be culled from existing data. Some, I guess, would argue these [...]

Interactive Garage Sale Map

If you’re looking to understand what an interactive, data-driven story would look like…look no more. Pegasus News uses the Craigslist API to pull in information and then invites users to submit content.
What you get is…this: The Pegasus News Garage Sale Map of the Dallas-Fort Worth.

Thoughts on the Distributed Story

I’m finishing up the introduction to The Cult of Me. When I’m finished, I’ll post it on the book wiki. It’s been a weirdly difficult road, trying to mash down my ideas into a digestible form. The hardest part for me is last section, summarizing what this new digital storytelling will look like.
I can see [...]

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