Category Archives: Personal
White House Tweetup live blog
I was invited to attend the holiday edition White House Tweetup on Monday. In the morning we will ask questions of many administration officials including CTO Aneesh Chopra, economic adviser Brian Deese, first lady chief of staff Tina Tchen, director of digital strategy Macon Phillips, and the White House pastry chef Bill Yosses.
I’ll try to live blog the day here (cell service permitting). Send me your questions and comments on Twitter @jeffsonderman and watch the #WHtweetup hashtag.
11:52 a.m. Unfortunately, no cell service or wifi in the meeting room this morning. I’ll post updates later when I can.
6:03 p.m. Well, sorry the live blogging didn’t work out during the event. You missed out on some witty comments here and there, but the best parts of the day were captured in photos. See them here.
My career v3.0: Writing and teaching mobile, social media for Poynter
A little over a year ago I blogged here about starting version 2.0 of my journalism career for an ambitious local online news startup in Washington, D.C. TBD.com has been an incredible experience, with some bumps along the way but no regrets.
I may blog sometime later about lessons learned from my time here as the senior community host and now managing editor, but today I want to share that I am soon going to be moving to a new job.
In a couple weeks I will join The Poynter Institute — analyzing, writing and teaching about mobile and social media in the new news system.
The staff of Poynter Online are filling Poynter.org with outstanding coverage of the news industry, and I’m excited to contribute to that in some of the most exciting and fast-evolving branches of technology. I’ll also be involved in training programs at the institute and consulting for individual companies who are looking to take their social, mobile or community engagement approaches to a higher level.
The big goal of my new position at Poynter is “thought leadership” for the mobile and social news industry — bringing analysis to the big issues and developments and helping anyone who’s interested figure out what it means and what to do about it. However, I don’t expect to do this by shouting from a mountaintop.
I’ll be carrying forward the things I learned at TBD about the power of community engagement and involving users in the entire content cycle. Thought leadership isn’t really leadership if no one’s following you, so I hope you’ll all come along with me to help explore and discuss. My door is always open at jeff(at)jeffsonderman.com, on Twitter @jeffsonderman, or my relatively new Facebook page.
I want to hear from you about what you’re doing in the mobile or social space, or what you want a news provider to do for you. What do you think is being done well? What are the biggest questions that need attention?
UPDATE: For those of you I’ve gotten to know here in D.C., yes I will be staying in the area and working from here. Also, thanks to Steve Buttry for his very kind words about my move.
The TBD community shows what it’s about
I felt like I needed to write something about today’s announced changes at TBD, which consist of widespread layoffs of the news staff. Rather than talk about the changes themselves, which you can read about many places and will take some time to play out, I would like to highlight the reaction.
2010 in review: Top blog posts and tweets
As we all do when a year comes to a close, I’m taking a look back at 2010. Below are my most-read posts from this blog and my most-retweeted posts from Twitter for the year.
Most-read posts
- My career v2.0 (beta)
- Malcolm Gladwell’s errors on social media activism
- What is journalism school for?
- Video: Watch the sessions from ONA 2010
- Answers to 10 key community engagement questions for news sites
Most retweeted
(FYI, this is based on Twitter’s automatic retweets, not counting modified retweets)
Happy new year, everyone. (more…)
Amy on TV again
My wife Amy was interviewed on local TV news in Winchester for the local MDA lockup she organized. As always, a great performance. (more…)
Find me at Digital Capital Week (#DCweek)
Digital Capital Week kicks off with a big party tonight at and around Long View Gallery in NW. There are a ton of great events (including one hosted by TBD) over the following week for the DC area digital/tech community. (more…)
My Career v2.0 (beta)
I’m excited to announce today that I am joining the Washington, D.C., digital news startup led by Jim Brady and Allbritton Communications. I’ll be working as Senior Community Host on Steve Buttry‘s community engagement team, developing ways to work with bloggers and users to generate, share and discuss content.
Our goal is to build an online news site for the DC metro area, and do it taking full advantage of the how the web works — with partnership not competition, users not readers, conversation not dictation, linking not duplicating. (more…)
Awards for great journalism
The Pennsylvania Newspaper Association released today its Keystone Awards for the best journalism of 2009. My Times-Tribune news reporters cleaned up first place in our division for all the major reporting categories — investigative, spot news and series. The total newsroom haul is 12 awards, also for features, sports, photos and design. This comes shortly after we won a PNA award for “Best Application of Social Networking Tools.”
Great work by the following, and those who helped make it happen:
- First place, Investigative Reporting, Borys Krawczeniuk, for his stories on Bob Mellow’s campaign expenses.
- First place, Columns, Chris Kelly, for a selection of his Sunday columns.
- First place, Spot News, staff, for coverage of the slain trooper.
- First place, Series, Borys Krawczeniuk and Jeremy Burton, mayor series.
- First place, Sports/Outdoor Column, Donnie Collins.
- First place, Photo Story, Mike Mullen, Butch Comegys & Staff, “Hero” coverage.
- 2nd place, Special Projects, Staff, for the “Hope at Home” section on lung cancer.
- 2nd place, Special Event Coverage, Scott Walsh, Donnie Collins & Herb Smith.
- 2nd place, News Photo, Jason Farmer, “Standoff.”
- 2nd place, Page Design, Chad Sebring, “Joe Biden: Ups and Downs”
- Honorable Mention, Feature Beat Reporting, Stacy Brown, “Remembering Michael Jackson.”
- Honorable Mention, Page Design, Bob Sanchuk, Outlook 2009, Back to School, Presidential Prelude.
Social networking recognition
I’m taking a moment to brag about a great accomplishment at our newspaper. The Times-Tribune won the Best Application of Social Networking Tools in the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association’s 2010 Newspaper Excellence in Cyberspace awards.
Here is the judges’ statement:
“Great to see that personal and conversation updates occur on the Facebook and Twitter accounts for the newspaper. Most newspapers overlook this opportunity and risk losing some of their followers because of it. Not here! We were also impressed that the staff goes to the “Tweet-Ups” in the area. Overall, the diversity and personal touches of the social applications make the program successful. We’d also like to suggest a ‘hip staff’ award to these folks.”
We work hard to make time for engaging our users and being responsive through social networks. It feels good to see that effort recognized with this award, but we really measure our success by the amount of engagement and interaction we have with our online community. So thanks to them most of all.
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