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ulken.com · Eric Ulken’s adventures in online journalism

Down with portals

News websites should aim to "build a network, not a destination," inserting themselves "into the clickstream" whenever possible. Amen, Rich Gordon!

latimes.com’s most searched-for people in 2006

Indulging my fascination with tag clouds and text mining, I dug through our traffic stats for 2006 to create a fun little visual representation of search terms used to find stories on latimes.com.

Digg and other cutting-edge stuff

OK, I may be the last person to discover the wonders of digg, but that doesn't mean I can't write about it. Digg is essentially a link repository coupled with a user rating system. It does certain things very well — namely, collecting and filtering links to interesting ...

Google News bias?

My OJR piece on political bias in Google News search results is generating some discussion in the blogosphere. Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Watch offers up a thoughtful critique of my thesis (on which the article is based), and he makes some very good points. He points out a few ...

The smoke seen ’round the world

I guess somebody had to do it... MSNBC has trained a webcam on the Sistine Chapel chimney from which a puff of white smoke will herald the selection of a new pope. Some will no doubt see the "SmokeCam" as a revolution in you-are-there journalism. Now you, ...

Bloggers, journalists cross paths in Hollywood

The theme of the 2004 Online News Association conference, if there was one, seems to be that journalists and their uncredentialed, unkempt, pajama-clad cousins have learned to live together in the online realm. Everyone now pretty much agrees that bloggers have an important role in social discourse, even if ...

Confession: I lied, and it was justified

What's wrong with this picture? Everything. Let me explain. For one, I never should have seen this, the registration screen for the San Jose Mercury News site. But today I ended up here, even though I already had an account in Knight Ridder's database (KR, which owns the Merc, keeps ...

Kinsley preaches to the crowd

I went to a forum Tuesday night featuring Michael Kinsley, the founding editor of Slate and the new editorial/opinion editor for the Los Angeles Times. Some of you might also remember him from his role opposite Pat Buchanan and Robert Novak on CNN's Crossfire. Kinsley, in conversation with ...

Blogging the convention

I believe there are more people blogging the Democratic convention than reading about it.

We made it through ‘Making it in L.A.’

Today my colleagues in the multimedia reporting class and I presented our final project, a website called "Making it in L.A." I think we're all pretty happy with how it turned out. Let us know what you think by signing the guest book on the site. Here's a nice ...

January 25th 2011
Category: News No Comments

Back to the newsroom, off to Seattle

When I left the Los Angeles Times in the depths of the 2008 financial crisis -- a time when the newspaper industry's future looked particularly bleak -- I wondered wistfully if I was walking away from my last newspaper job. I'd worked for newspaper companies my entire career, and despite ...
January 23rd 2011
Category: Views One Comment

Libraries: An appreciation

If I couldn't be a journalist, I think I'd be a librarian. I decided this after spending a lot of time in libraries in the last couple of years and interacting with some very smart (and completely unstuffy) librarians. Maybe it's because, as it turns out, journalists and librarians have a ...
August 20th 2010
Category: Idea file 3 Comments

Flash in the pan?

I am an ex-Flash user. I uninstalled the Flash plug-in on my primary browser about a month ago, and I haven't looked back. Here's how it happened: Back when Apple announced that its forthcoming iPad would lack Flash support, it sounded to me like a boneheaded move. If a device built ...
March 21st 2010
Category: Events No Comments

Continue the discussion here

Thanks to all who turned out today at UBC Robson Square for my workshop on online tools and techniques for journalists. I'm creating this post as a way to continue the discussion online. If you have questions or comments on the topics we discussed, please share them in the comments, ...
March 6th 2010
Category: News No Comments

Checking in from Canada

In the four months since my last post — yes, I'm a terrible blogger — I've moved to Vancouver and started teaching at the University of British Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. Among other things, I'm coordinating the school's Integrated Journalism course, required of all first-year students, and advising some ...