We create the stories of the connected society

The first full day of WeMedia presented interesting challenges and opportunities regarding the state of new media, social change, and journalism. Conversations revolved around the future of traditional media, expanding the scope of social media companies to facilitate social change, how to more effectively run a business, how to reach target audiences, and more. As [...]

We Media’s Brian Reich and I were wondering, based on the Game Changer Award winners, what would be the attributes that would not only win today’s Pitch It! presenters some of the available funding, but also see them be the Game Changers a couple/few years from now.
A few things have marked the Game Changers, based [...]

We’ve recorded another podcast!
WeMedia is producing a regular podcast that features in-depth interviews with prominent media, technology, and social change figures, as well as distinguished experts on current affairs and news.  Today marks our second installment.  Our goal is to help the WeMedia community understand the roots of the changes taking place in our society, [...]

McDonald’s has decided to pick a fight with Starbucks.
In addition to offering espresso drinks to their billions of customers served, the fast food chain has launched a massive online/offline/outdoor marketing effort to distinguish itself from the world’s most popular coffee chain.  The concept is not original – Dunkin’ Donuts has been comparing itself to the [...]

With the economy sputtering and job losses mounting, there is a lot of discussion right now about what kinds of jobs, and more importantly skills, are needed to get things back on track.  This discussion is all the more complicated because of the massive changes our society is currently undergoing, as we become more diverse [...]

We’ve heard enough. That’s why we want – and get – something different from tonight’s final presidential debate.
Sosolimited, three MIT-educated software engineers-slash-culture jammers, will remix the debate using software that allows them to sample and analyze the video, audio, and closed captioned text of the television broadcast. Through a series of visual and sonic transformations [...]

One of the loveliest social media startups I’ve run across in the last few years is Scrapblog. I say lovely because it’s well designed and design itself is a core value of the service and the user experience. Users create multimedia collages with Scrapblog, then share them with embed codes, just like you share YouTube [...]

PC pulls an advertisement in the guise of an editorial, called “Stop Switching to Mac”, from the sacrosanct news wall on today’s front page of NewYorkTimes.com. Washingtonpost.com, too. A godlike Mac watches and comments just below the nameplate.

Play is to our time what work was to the Industrial Society: our dominant way of knowing, doing and creating value.
Now Spore has arrived in North America to mess with our gene pool. The multi-genre “massively single-player online game” allows a player to control the evolution of a species from its beginnings as a unicellular [...]

The Society of News Design has announced the World’s Best Designed Newspapers, an award I conceived as chair of SND’s design competition back in 1995. Once again no American newspapers. Papers in Europe, Mexico and former Eastern bloc countries have dominated the World’s Best competition, reflecting the emergence of free expression and the flourishing of [...]

You’ve got to know the secret handshake to fully appreciate this gem from www.washingtonpost.com

Our friend and former colleague Charles Blow has joined the blogging brethren with a discussion on all things statistical. A visual Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, Charles served as the paper’s graphics director and as Design Director for News prior to leaving to become Art Director of National Geographic. Back in the day, [...]

As news industry conferences go, this is the good one. The right-brainers who attend SND’s annual designfest have managed to make newspapers and websites around the world more interesting and accessible, even as their left-brainer publishers screwed up a coupla good mediums. Somehow, the creative class has remained enthusiastic about the future.
SND is sharing the [...]

Just when you or your favorite school teacher thought there was no way in hell the English language could survive the abomination of text message shorthand, aka textese, a British linguist has thrown a bucket of cold water on the world’s SMS malcontents. David Crystal writes in his new book, Txtng: the Gr8 Db8, that [...]

Adrian Holovaty is the news industry’s favorite techie, even as he develops a kind of news that is changing the newspaper game.
EveryBlock, his latest project funded with a $1.1 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s News Challenge, enables citizens to create a profile of their own neighborhood by utilizing the [...]