Like many people, I was psyched when the latest season of House of Cards was released. What fresh hell would be unleashed by the power-hungry, morally bankrupt, yet oddly compelling Frank and Claire Underwood? I popped some popcorn, made a tequila sunrise, and as I settled in to watch, I started to see real news people show up in this fictional show. I addressed this in a blog post last December (“Why The News Media Should Strive for the Pulitzer, not the Oscar!”), but it’s w

As media becomes more ubiquitous, naturally, we consume (and crave!) more of it. The easier it is to consume, the more of it we want. Perhaps most helpful to this trend is that “the media” now goes where we go via our mobile devices. So it’s no shock that, according to eMarketer data, the average time spent per day with “Major Media - Digital” climbed to 5 hours and 43 minute in 2017 and is expected to reach 6 hours and 1 minute in 2018. Check out the chart below. What is als

We all want our work to be seen. We want our stories to be clicked on, our videos to be shared, our posts to be “liked.” We all need some component of “marketing” to make sure our work is shared or experienced (if that is indeed your goal). But coming up with clickbaity headlines and unique hashtags is taking up almost as much time as creating your piece of work! Let’s talk about writers specifically for a moment. What if - and I know this seems to be scary –a story could be

Social media makes it easy to be polarizing. Black or White, Yes or No, Republican or Democrat. Often, there is little room for nuance, context and thoughtful discourse. As the “virtual” iteration of who we are, social media often gives us a one-dimensional look at ourselves and our “friends.” Let’s look at an example. Sue may have expressed support for Hillary Clinton on her Facebook page. To many, that one “thing” about Sue can tell you many other things about her (she is p

Is there an actor shortage? It seems like there are an awful lot of real reporters who are making appearances in movies and TV shows. While it’s not new to see “real” reporters in the movies, in the age of fake news and “post truth” (the unfortunate choice for the “word of the year” from the folks over at Oxford Dictionaries), all of the sudden it feels icky to see our trusted sources of information shilling for the latest Batman movie (a la Charlie Rose). Sure, it’s fun to s

This election season has brought to light a particularly virulent strain of fake news. It’s true that people promoting fake information is as old as time, but the internet has made it easy for anyone to create social media profiles and websites in order to post whatever they want under the guise of “journalism.” In a disturbing study by BuzzFeed, they found that fake election news outperformed legitimate news on Facebook. Apparently, this is the new normal for news. The debat