Blog
Edited: The Curious Journalist’s Guide to Data
Here’s an incisive and smartly written report from data guru Jonathan Stray, formerly of the Associated Press. In The Curious Journalist’s Guide to Data he breaks down and apart the fundamental ideas that underlie the human use of data. See more blog posts.
Call for Pitches: The Future of Money
This March at How We Get To Next, we’re hosting a month-long conversation about the future of money and nationhood. Check out the call for pitches that went out today. Writers everywhere, get in touch! See more blog posts.
Edited: Journalism “Guides to…”
This month we wrapped our collection of “Guides to” for journalists working at the intersection of storytelling and technology. There’s now four handbooks available on the Tow website: Guide to Automated Journalism, Guide to Podcasting, Guide to Crowdsourcing, and Guide to Chat Apps. As usual, it was a total pleasure working with the research directors […]
Edited: Virtual Reality Journalism
Virtual reality and the technology that enables it isn’t being made for journalists. But they better learn how to use it nonetheless. Taylor Owen and Fergus Pitt report for the Tow Center in Virtual Reality Journalism. See more blog posts.
That NY Prison Break
Keeping the world’s most dangerous criminals behind bars is no easy task, as the guards from Clinton Correctional Facility in New York found out now going on three weeks ago. But there’s a tech arms race afoot inside prisons worldwide—and I recently went down into the Internet rabbit hole to investigate. Read about six high-tech security […]
Edited: The Traffic Factories (May 2015)
Caitlin Petre’s hugely influential report, The Traffic Factories: Metrics at Chartbeat, Gawker Media, and The New York Times, about the differences (and convergences) between how publications use modern metrics on how you read is now live. *I’d say the most fun thing about editing this report is that Petre herself is a former copy editor, […]
Boston’s Worst Winter (Mar. 2015)
March 11, 2015: Think gargantuan, iceberg-like snowbanks. (At one point cyclists even shoveled a 40-foot tunnel through one so they could ride their bikes where the path used to be—city planning at its best.) A T-system slowed to a halt. Once-wide streets turned into one-way thoroughfares. Cars left outside in parking spots, snowed into place for […]
Edited: Lies, Damn Lies (Feb. 2015)
I spent a lot of my Christmas break living inside the lies of the Internet. Today’s modern agenda is to push content viral, but it’s worth stopping to think about the juicy rumors that often make this happen (and just how hard it is to debunk them). The latest research from the Tow Center and […]
That Idea of Me (Dec. 2014)
December 4, 2014: I’ve gone a bit silent over these airwaves in the past few months. Most great thinkers say we need quiet to get to know ourselves, to get better acquainted, get some hard work done, and intimately forgive when we abandon all these things and hurdle ourselves into bed. This past January, nearly one […]
Edited: The New Global Journalism
October 15, 2014: In this era of post-legacy, there’s been a serious shift in foreign correspondence—or so I learned recently when I copy edited this report spearheaded by Columbia University’s Ann Cooper. Essentially, the idea of “being there” has taken on new meaning with the proliferation of Twitter and blogs, and the ongoing censorship against […]
Summer: She’s Come and Gone
September 11, 2014: To me, the month of August feels like deep, sweaty summer. Then, all of the sudden, September arrives abruptly and the dog days are but one hazy, photo-composite of a memory. There’s a frenzy as kids go back to school and we-the-responsible remember that we have work to do. I spent the […]
Edited: Digital Security for Journalists
July 8, 2014: This report, available to read online or order in print, is a tour de force about how journalists must now protect themselves and their sources online. There are precautions to take, some of them requiring a workaround digital-savvy, to keep your information from becoming discoverable. It was quite an experience to copy […]
Tell Me Something I Don’t Know
June 5, 2014: Your socks don’t match. I like your Facebook post. You look really tired today. Life is full of critiques and thoughtless compliments. Even from those closest to us. They vary from the simplest of things, to those deeper observations about our opinions and conduct that burn a little more. When I write […]
Edited: Sensors and Journalism
May 10, 2014: I’m beyond excited to see this report by Tow Fellow Fergus Pitt finally come to digital life! Fergus and I spent many, many hours in back-and-forth academic and practical conversation about how sensors and drones are at work in modern journalism—and how to most effectively communicate his gigantic amount of research to […]
Those Aimless Days We Spent Together
May 1, 2014: There is this circulating truth that it’s near impossible to make best friends after, say, age 30. A wonderful article in The New York Times reminds us that our childhood ideals of friendship, inspired by “The Godfather” (and maybe a movie with less murder like “Now and Then”), start to seem unachievable with […]
I Wonder If Everything I Do, I Do Instead of Something I Want to Do More
April 3, 2014: Life is monotonous; life is hard. Joy is, I think, hard to come by. Sometimes I even forget to recognize it. A longtime friend of mine was recently in town and we found ourselves hard-pressed to identify—to remember even—the few things that truly delight us. For her, it’s swing sets and a […]
More
March 13, 2014: This one’s for my most conscientious friends, the supportive grumblers who delicately reminded me that I missed sending a regularly scheduled newsletter two weeks ago. All apologies, and thanks for paying attention. The thing is, I’ve been busy. I’ve written 35 pages of semi-memoir, freelanced a feature piece about female entrepreneurs, and […]
I was on T.V. (kind of)
February 13, 2014: I saw myself differently yesterday and deduced two things: 1) I have a really deep voice for a female and 2) I am in desperate need of a haircut. My first visitor,@oliviakoski, is here and I was a guest on her weekly broadcast, Creatavist Live! We listened to some John Denver; chatted fireside about the […]
Do Some Good
January 31, 2014: You’ve tuned into the slow evolution of someone who’s always been told what to do, and then did it. This bi-monthly, Thursday correspondence comes two weeks and one fine day after the last (that is to say, late). And it’s got me thinking some about how I attach most of my ideas about […]
The Flight I Didn’t Get On
January 16, 2014: It was Delta 220—Denver to New York, via Minneapolis—the return leg of a roundtrip ticket spent in Vail with my parents over Christmas. I never even went to the airport, because some weeks back I had gone in and quit my job in Brooklyn and had started telling everyone I knew I […]