Tom Davidson

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 […]

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 […]

I started reading a new blog today – one launched by a handful of writers to continue the work they were doing at a now-defunct trade magazine. I commend them. They’re gamely carrying on in the face of the implosion of their publication, and they’re doing it without getting paid. But I’m not linking to […]

A self-deprecating aside from long ago: When I first ran a semi-big local website, sophisticated content-management systems were just becoming available. Big chunks of the site were programmed by hand, using HTML code written by producers. Those hand-coded pages were then shipped off to our distant web server by a direct-transfer process known as FTP. To make life […]