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 [...]

… while I started a new gig. I’m now serving as a senior director and publisher for a news and public affairs project at PBS.org. My time working with both GrowthSpur and Localist.com has been a blast. But the chance to work with Christine Montgomery and the crew at PBS was too much to pass [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 had a quick conversation the other day with someone interested in using my colleagues at GrowthSpur  to help launch his news web site. As usual, I encouraged him to charge ahead – but urged him to pick a niche, not launch a general news web site. This goes against years of training and experience [...]