Tom Davidson

I can tell there was another round of layoffs at one of my old newsrooms: I’ve had a flurry of LinkedIn invites from former colleagues. There’s been the usual grumbling about the heartless bastards at corporate, at how these cuts will only further diminish our Noble Religious Calling, etc. – but the reality is these [...]

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 [...]

The very interesting social-media curation tool Storify was released in private beta on Tuesday at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference. It neatly twists the idea behind Flipboard. Flipboard automatically generates a list of stories that might interest you, based on links suggested by people you follow on Twitter or your Facebook friends. Storify reverses the flow – [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Over at the GrowthSpur blog, Mark Potts and I have posted about a bunch of free tools we like that are highly useful for entrepreneurial journalists. (Oh – and that jokey lead about hardware stores? Not a joke. I’m so bad that the Fabulous Sue Corbett (trademark pending) jabbed me in a one-act play about Noah’s [...]

Eleven years ago, I caught the break of my life: I got a one-year Knight Fellowship at Stanford. (I still find it so shocking that I rarely mention it. Friends say it usually takes at least 18 seconds before I bring it up in conversation.) I’m unabashed about how grateful I am to the program [...]

Publlishing hyperlocal information? Getting some grant money for it now from a local foundation? Or running a local foundation that’s interested in doing more to improve the flow of information, especially as traditional media suffer 1,000 cuts? Here’s a chance to double down – and also gain access to significant training, guidance and knowledge. The Knight [...]

I’ve ranted a couple of times already about how journopreneurs need to make smart, inexpensive choices – especially about technology. Over at the GrowthSpur blog, my colleague Dave Chase offers his thoughts (also live at OJR) about picking a good online content management system. Dave speaks from vast experience. He was on the launch team [...]

It happened again: I heard a tale of a laid-off journalist who spotted an unmet need – a community that was no longer being covered the way it should be. So she decided to launch a neighborhood blog. Terrific! Then came the thud: She’s already hired someone to take care of all the technology and [...]