Tom Davidson

My friend and former colleague Bill Day and I just finished a great six-week course in entrepreneurial journalism for 18 graduate students in American University’s Interactive Journalism master’s program. We set out to be intentionally provocative, because Bill and I have seen too many great ideas for projects and products turn into smoldering wreckage because [...]

Some of them, anyway. Over the past month or so, I’ve been plowing through an extensive stack of resumes to fill some openings on my new team at PBS. Many of the resumes were sort of sad – those of journalists with impeccable traditional credentials, and no clue what I meant when I asked for [...]

My friends at the Online News Association put together a terrific program at the University of Alabama-Birmingham for entrepreneurial journalists and others interested in starting news and information sites. (Thanks to the Gannett Foundation for the necessary financial support.)  I spoke a bit about emerging business models to support these kinds of sites (and – plug [...]

When you check out Tigers.com this morning, you see video of a brilliant catch … but not of a badly botched call that cost a team a perfect game. Similarly, if you check out TwinsBaseball.com, you see video of home runs … but not an equally botched call that cost the Twins (disclosure: my favorite team) [...]

The Knight Digital Media Center’s entrepeneurial bootcamp at USC has been terrific. (Search #uscnewsbiz on Twitter to get a feel for how terrific.) Here’s a bucket o’ links and resources I referred to in the discussion at the Knight Digital Media Center’s Entrepreneurial Boot Camp. (They may be useful, of course, to other journopreneurs.) First [...]

I’ve been preparing a presentation to the terrific News Entrepreneur Boot Camp at the Knight Digital Media Center next week. I’m part of a panel of folks who have transitioned from the newsroom to business-side roles. As part of the prep work, I’ve re-read a hefty stack of posts about emerging revenue models for news – [...]

Most of what I hate about the newspaper industry was encapsulated in a single session at the American Society of News (not Newspapers! Really!) Editors meeting in D.C. a few days ago. An otherwise smart agenda took the inevitable detour down the rabbit hole with yet another discussion of pay walls. Walter Hussman, publisher of [...]

Matt Mullenweg is at it again. He’s the creator of WordPress, one of the free tools that’s reinventing the world of media and the very definition of what it means to be a “journalist.” How does Mullenweg justify giving away the results of years of work? Then working more untold hours on upgrades (helllll-ooooo Version 3!)? Then [...]

OK, I know that I rant about Moore’s Law continually. It’s the key driver of the digital age. It’s why things that seem incomprehensible get invented, and it’s why things that flopped spectacularly just a few years ago are common and successful today. But many people – traditional journalists especially – struggle to get Moore’s [...]

Hal Varian – brilliant economist, one of the few to apply the discipline to information, and all-round nice guy — got off a terrific blog post  at Google today. I’d love to write extensively on it. But, as usual, Hal expresses his ideas far better than my pea brain can. In about 1,100 words, he manages to [...]