A Talk Or Two

Shameless self-promotion alert: Here are links to two talks I gave recently (“recently” being stretched to mean “three months ago”).

I would summarize them, but that would take work, and it’s the weekend…

More seriously – but it is also the weekend – the first is a talk I gave at the International Symposium on Online Journalism in Austin, Texas, back in April. The topic was News: What is it, who is it for, and how can we rethink it for the digital era? and it’s mostly about the need for imagination in journalism innovation, but the Q&A session afterwards, expertly moderated by Neil Chase of CalMatters, roams all over the place. I had fun, but your mileage may vary; there isn’t a transcript so you’ll have to wade through 45 minutes or so of bad jokes and poor analogies to capture the entire essence of my ramblings.

And a shout out to Rosental Alves, who created the conference two decades or so ago, and who had the bad judgement to invite me to speak.

The second is the lunchtime keynote I gave at this year’s Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in Denver in June; I don’t think I had a title for it, and if I did, I’ve since forgotten. It was mostly about – well, a bunch of things, ranging from the need for us to focus as much on communities and audiences and their needs as on the stories we want to write; the importance of diversity in management ranks and greater sensitivity to our blind spots; and why framing stories and language are critical. There’s no shortage of bad jokes, too.

The link takes you to the text of the 15-minute talk, and at the bottom of the page is the actual video; my part comes on at about the 50-minute mark. The jokes are better in the video; the text is faster to read. Your call.

Hugely honored to have been asked to give both talks; sorrier for the people who had to sit through them. And gave me a chance to distill a lot of what I’ve been writing about here and thinking about more generally. Would love to hear thoughts and comments.