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

Filling in the blanks on DocumentCloud

My OJR post on DocumentCloud, the much-buzzed-about $1-million Knight News Challenge grant proposal, is up. I did an e-mail interview with three of the proposal's authors, Aron Pilhofer of The New York Times and Scott Klein and Eric Umansky of ProPublica. Here's an excerpt: Aron Pilhofer: The grant would be used ...

Making sense of data at The New York Times

(After a long holiday hiatus, I'm finally getting around to posting this write-up of my visit with Aron Pilhofer at the NYT.) Tuesday, Dec. 23, 2008: The digital art installation in the lobby of the new New York Times building says more, I think, about the future of news and of ...

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 ...