Live 2010 Election Day Chat on Social Media + Politics

This was the first live chat I’ve helped plan and participated in. Although I got bumped from my afternoon slot to the end of the night by Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, I did succeed in getting him to comment on my review of the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. Here was the chat line [...]

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How the Tea Party Utilized Digital Media to Gain Power

This piece, which I wanted to call “The Digitally Driven Rise of the Tea Party,” was originally about how the right was using new media to oppose climate protection regulations. The idea for the piece grew out of earlier conversations I’d had with climate activists about what made their organizations different from right wing groups. [...]

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How Climate Activists Are Warming to Social Media

350.org is an influential newcomer to the environmental movement. I was curious to hear how they got their start so I used this social media piece as an excuse to talk with some interesting people. An abridged version of this story focused exclusively on 350.org ran on the front page of the Huffington Post’s Green [...]

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Writers Talk About Working the Hyper-Local Beat

This is my second piece for PBS MediaShift, which is again looking at new opportunities for journalists. Although the quotes I got were much less explosive than in the previous piece, I still managed to work in a great anecdote about dropping inappropriate Sarah Palin references into blog posts to drive traffic. In my first [...]

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Writers Explain What It’s Like Toiling on the Content Farm

This is my first piece for my new employer, PBS MediaShift. It is my first of two contributions to our week-long series, Beyond Content Farms.  The site is examining the rise of farmed and hyper-local content, with my pieces focused on what it’s like to work in these areas. (For an introduction to content farms [...]

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