You know journalism is in trouble when you know this: I'm being invited to teach a class at a respected journalism school. The fun part, and not a very surprising part given the state of the industry right now, is that neither they nor I have a really solid idea what the class is going to be. The class will start in the fall of 2010, so we have time to figure it out.

Obviously, given what I do now, they're not asking me to give a seminar on modern American narrative. I'm a journalist who builds ...

So there was a little news around here lately. PolitiFact won a Pulitzer Prize. To say I'm still in shock is an understatement. A week later, it doesn't seem real.

All week long, we've been talking about how PolitiFact started, how it all came together. It's been fun remembering how it started out with Bill Adair having an idea and me having an idea on how we could pull it off. The crude mock-ups, the development environment on a box that was headed for the trash. I still can't believe we did it. But out ...

On every web project I've worked, one of the key/top/vital priorities was to make sure that Google could index every single last word of the site so that if someone was searching for what we had, they'd find it. My most recent project turned that on its head.

What if you don't want Google to index everything? What if you only want Google to index this, but not that?

The project where this came up was Tampa Bay Mug Shots, a site that displays the mug shots of people booked into county jails in three ...

This blog has been quiet of late because I've been working in every spare moment I have on a couple of projects that are going to launch soon, good lord willing and the creek don't rise. Given that I'm sleep deprived, stressed and generally ground down to a nub, it's a bad, bad time for me to read my media-heavy RSS feeds.

Before I get myself into trouble, I just want to say this: If all these people who know so much about journalism on the web spent less time on waving their arms in hysterics ...

Everything you need to know about using Twitter for marketing and PR is at this very descriptive url:

http://www.howtousetwitterformarketingandpr.com/

That’s right: Don’t. Don’t use Twitter for marketing.

Why?

Let me draw a comparison for you: What would you call someone who uses a program to automatically send you an annoying volume of email? A spammer. So what makes you think that because it’s 140 characters and on some trendy web service that blasting away with soulless and automatic links isn’t spam?

So that’s why I say automated means to add content ...

Mark Potts had some nice things to say about the new version of PolitiFact that we recently launched. But one of the things he wrote I wanted to amplify:

None of this really looks like traditional journalism. The Obameter doesn't follow conventional story formats in any way, and is really a hybrid between data, reporting, news and information presentation. We need to see a lot more of this. There are a many different ways to tell a story, especially online, and the more experimentation we see with journalism forms, the faster the state of the art will evolve and ...

* Note: This post came from a version of this blog that got lost in a server failure. It's been restored from old RSS feeds, Google caches and other sources. As such, the comments, links and associated media have been lost.

I've launched a new app at work: Neighborhood Watch. We've got lots of plans for it, but at launch it focuses on home sales in over 200 neighborhoods in Pinellas and Pasco counties in the Tampa Bay area.

The seed for this app actually started in 2004, when I wrote this. At the time, we did 30 ...

* Note: This post came from a version of this blog that got lost in a server failure. It's been restored from old RSS feeds, Google caches and other sources. As such, the comments, links and associated media have been lost.

There's a group of fellow journalists who are getting really sick of what we're calling Wordpress Heroes. What is a Wordpress Hero? Back home, we'd call them All Hat and No Cattle. A Wordpress Hero is someone smart enough to setup a blog and fire away with grand ideas, but too dumb to use things like ...

* Note: This post came from a version of this blog that got lost in a server failure. It's been restored from old RSS feeds, Google caches and other sources. As such, the comments, links and associated media have been lost.

First, the grains of salt:

• I don’t live in an EveryBlock city. I think a key part of EveryBlock is the visceral connection you have with your neighborhood. I don’t have that, so view my comments with that in mind.


• Huge Adrian Holovaty fan. Huge Django fan. Big believer in breaking out of the story centric worldview ...

* Note: This post came from a version of this blog that got lost in a server failure. It's been restored from old RSS feeds, Google caches and other sources. As such, the comments, links and associated media have been lost.

The other component of the data ghetto that bothers me is that you can’t find that data outside the ghetto. Please, someone point me to a place where there’s dynamic content being fed to the story level pages. I have yet to see where someone’s crime data is being fed into a story about a crime ...

* Note: This post came from a version of this blog that got lost in a server failure. It's been restored from old RSS feeds, Google caches and other sources. As such, the comments, links and associated media have been lost.

One resolution for this year: Post more often. Starting now.

I’m not sold on the whole Data Desk/Data Center idea that a lot of newspaper websites are trying out. I hate to say all this because at a lot of places, the people responsible for them are my friends. But for all the love I have for ...

In a comment, Ben asked how PolitiFact went from idea to PolitiFact.

How did that get refined into the site we see today? Was the content and feature refinement mostly the work of web people or people from the print newsroom? Any lessons learned to help the rest of us help our editors and reportorial colleges see the new dimensions web apps can bring to conventional content?

The content and feature refinement, at least at first, was the work of Bill Adair and I almost exclusively. After we first talked over the idea, I sketched out how I thought the ...

* Note: This post came from a version of this blog that got lost in a server failure. It's been restored from old RSS feeds, Google caches and other sources. As such, the comments, links and associated media have been lost.

It’s been quiet around here for a while. There’s a good reason. It’s called PolitiFact and it marks a major shift in my career.

What is PolitiFact?

The site is a simple, old newspaper concept that’s been fundamentally redesigned for the web. We’ve taken the political “truth squad” story, where a reporter takes a ...

There’s a minor meme going around right now that goes like this: Let’s teach programmers journalism. But I’m a journalist and want to learn, where’s my scholarship? Journalists don’t need to learn to program. Yes they do. No they don’t.

William Hartnett does a pretty good job of getting at some of my feelings on this but here’s one more: Journalists don’t need to learn how to code if all you think journalism can be is words/pictures/video.

Not to sound like Morpheus in the Matrix talking about what is real ...