About

Portrait of Tom DavidsonI am a digital journalist, a word pairing that should be as redundant as “consensus agreement” or “totally unique.”

I currently built stuff and teach – generally by consulting for a variety of commercial and public-media clients. I’ve served in general management and product-development roles at places like PBS Digital and the late Tribune Interactive. I’ve built stuff that worked,  stuff that should’ve worked, and stuff that blew up on the launch pad. Some people apparently believe the scars qualify me to teach young minds.

The “journalist” part of my career comes from (indecipherable murmur) years as a public-affairs and general-assignment reporter and editor for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, the Quad-City Times and other newspapers. The full litany of those misbegotten years is here. Don’t hold any of it against my editors. They tried.

All credit for the “digital” piece belongs to the Knight Fellowships at Stanford University. I studied the economics of digital information – and was lucky enough to do so at the top of the late ‘90s Internet bubble. (Yahoo! had just been launched by a couple Stanford grads – and two kids named Sergey and Larry were kicking around the place, too.)

From 2000 to 2009, I ran websites, built new products and otherwise served as a corporate staff dweeb at Tribune Interactive, the digital arm of Tribune Company. Since then, I’ve served as a consultant to academic centers, worked at a start-up, taught journopreneurship to a whip-smart bunch of graduate students at American University and the University of Maryland, and worked with wonderful people in the world of public media.

Contact me to find out more.

Disclosures:

I’ve provided consulting services to these organizations:

Politically, I characterize myself as a PO’d moderate. In the years when I was no longer working in newsrooms, I donated money to precisely one political candidate – the late state Sen. John Miller of Virginia, whom I counted as a friend. My two sons have had the privilege of serving as pages at the Virginia Senate due to John’s help.

Download:

My current resume/CV

One of my favorite presentations/lectures, on how technological change is affecting journalism (no, it’s not Google’s fault. Blame Gordon Moore).