Why don’t I have a calling? (a random complaint)

Or why wasn’t I good enough at something to the point where it became inevitable that I would do that thing and do it better than most people? I have always enjoyed the fact that my career has been, shall we say, eclectic. I’ve always lurked within the media and communications sphere, but trying different [...]

Olympic Fever(ish)

I’ve been tuning into the summer Olympics, mesmerized as I am by the sheer power and superhuman qualities of the athletes competing there. Last night I watched China win the gold in the men’s gymnastics. I sat on my couch holding my breath every time one of the athletes took to the floor, high bar, [...]

Getting Back to the Blog

So it’s been a long while since I sat at the Innovation Journalism conference (two days after quitting my job as a PR lady at a boutique agency that handles tech clients) and madly transcribed various panelists talking about innovation, journalism and Innovation Journalism to log what turned out to be my last blog entries [...]

The role of local media in covering innovation: challenges vs. best practice

Coverage of innovation is important for local media, not just big pubs. Local media:

disseminates information about innovation
create an understanding of innovation
put innovation on the agenda of the community
support the evolution of innovation system

Media as a feedback loop: they provide coverage and feedback on what’s been done so far.

Media enables innovation to evolve and improve
it is [...]

How to write about startups without causing a bubble

Bubble stories from the dot com boom: Webvan. Raised $370 million in IPO, expanded to 8 cities, gigantic infrastructure, 2000 employees, not enough customers. Pets.com. IPO to liquidation within 9 months. Hop On. Disposable mobile; dubbed one of the best inventions of year by TIME in 2001. Washington Post, BW wrote enthusiastically about it. Stock [...]

Reality Check

I’m at the Innovation Journalism conference at Stanford University, listening to a presentation by Erik M. on how journalists can avoid getting caught up in the wave of exuberance that often accompanies the startup culture that they report on. He says that, in Sweden at the publication where he works, journalists must include at least [...]

Cautionary tale: get those headphones out of your ears

Almost every woman out there has had a friend or relative warn her that she is putting herself at risk every time she plugs into her iPod or other music player before heading out for a run or walk. I know I have. But I mostly shrug it off and plug in anyway because I [...]

Chuck Lorre — hate his show, love his vanity cards

This is my first post in a while, and maybe it’s because nothing has inspired me to post in quite some time. Truth be told, I’ve been on a bit of a daily media diet of late, trying to read more books and fewer articles, but I picked up the Wall Street Journal this morning [...]

Follow me back to 2003…

In either 2002 or 2003, I wrote a story for Salon.com about a blogger, Helen Jane (now Helen Jane Hearn) who was hired as the official blogger on set for a film being made by Adam Goldberg called I Love Your Work. For the story, I interviewed a bunch of pioneering bloggers, including Meg Hourihan [...]

Sluts love Halloween, geeks love April Fool’s

I’ve been going through my Google reader this afternoon trying to catch up on what seems like millions of posts that have made their way into the ether over the past two days. Once I made it through the April 2 posts and got to the April 1 posts, something funny happened: the news became [...]