You may not know this about me, but I, yes, I am a fan of baseball’s New York Yankees.

After weeks of Paying Attention To Baseball, which I haven’t done with any real passion or regularity since Game 3 of the 2004 ALCS, it’s been over for days now, and I’ve gone back to spending free time in the evenings (after the toddler is asleep) puttering around, doing little bits of work, or obsessively playing games on my phone, among other distractions.

But I’m still paying attention… So, here are a few links and notes to commemorate the Yankees season.

Watching Yankees Spending
Published at Subtraction on November 8, 2009.
Khoi Vinh crunches numbers on baseball salaries as a share of a team’s total revenue to defend my beloved Yankees’ free-spending ways.
I’ve always thought, too, that vilifying the Yankees payroll was a perspective that lacked dimension. Yes, it’s a consistently stratospheric number, but isn’t it significant, too, that by making their home in New York the Yankees are at the epicenter of the biggest baseball market on the planet?

Yankees Closer Mariano Rivera’s Postseason Performance
Published at The New York Times on November 5, 2009.
Fantastic New York Times graphic detailing every batter Mariano Rivera has ever faced in the postseason.
He has allowed only 2 home runs, has 39 saves, and has a 0.74 e.r.a. over 88 postseason games. A batter-by-batter look at his playoff career.

The Yankees at the beginning
Published at The Greensboro News & Record on November 5, 2009.
John Robinson pulls a few classic pieces of minor league baseball coverage out of his paper’s archives on the occasion of the Yankees winning their 27th world championship last night.
Jeter’s first mention in our pages came Aug. 26, 1992: Derek Jeter , the Yankees’ No. 1 draft choice and the sixth player selected overall in the June amateur draft, made his Hornets’ debut at shortstop, hitting a home run in his second at-bat. He also committed an error.

Phillies make Mariano Rivera work, rough night for Charlie Manuel
Published at Sports Illustrated on October 30, 2009.
Tom Verducci on Mariano Rivera’s long outing in Game 2 and related topics.
Rivera is so good that it has come to this: he throws two shutout innings and the opponent can find hope in his pitch counts and their swings against him.

Seats of Gold
Published at ESPN Outside the Lines on October 3, 2009.
An ESPN.com reporter takes one for the team, sitting in the most expensive seats in the new Yankee Stadium, sipping champagne and spooning house-made relish on his gourmet sausage… Also, why those seats were mostly empty all season.
And so, ironically, everyone actually lost because everyone won too much. Wall Street folks wanted tickets to close deals. The fans thought they could use Wall Street greed to get something for nothing. The Yankees figured if someone was making all that money off their product, it should be them. These are the things I’m thinking about in the car to the stadium.

Most Commented Posts

• 10 obvious things about the future of newspapers you need to get through your head
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My advice to journalism students starts with this:

Blog.

That doesn’t mean you have to blog about journalism, or build a rabid political audience, or chronicle every step the Googles and Twitters and Apples of the world take.

It just means that you maintain a Web site where you write on a somewhat regular basis.

And by “maintain,” I mean you have the opportunity to learn as much as you’d like to learn about basic formatting for the Web. HTML, CSS, and if you’re a step more curious or industrious, blog software that mirrors (or exceeds) the functionality you’ll find in the content management systems at most professional news organizations.

That’s how I got started in this business. In fact, to be more precise, I think the first bits of code I touched had to do with making the title of my first Blogspot-hosted blog bigger, and changing its font and colors.

From there I switched to a hosted WordPress blog, learned a lot more about HTML and CSS, then decided I wanted to do more, bought my own domain and hosting (shouldn’t cost more than $10/month) and taught myself much, much more about making WordPress and similar content management systems dance.

But that digital specialty, (I can make your newspaper’s blogs look and act professional, and I can train your reporters to be better bloggers), as valuable as it was in 2006, wasn’t the only thing I learned as a journalism student.

Become an expert at one analog craft and one digital craft

An analog craft. Yes. Not knitting. Which is cool, but not what I mean, exactly.

When I say “analog,” what I mean is a core reporting skill. Those things journalism professors and newspaper editors talk about whenever the conversation about “what j-school students should learn these days, anyway” comes up. It’s very easy for me to say “well, of course you’re going to pick these core skills up along the way, right?”

But let’s get more specific.

I highly recommend that you specialize in an analog journalism craft.

Maybe one of these:

• Copy Editing
• Enterprise Reporting
• Photography
• Photo Editing
• Media Law

There are others, of course. But this is a short list of things you can pick up in school. I picked up a lot of copy editing, and some practice at what I’m ambitiously calling enterprise reporting, which I later cemented with an internship at a major metro paper.

The point: The Web is awesome, and we’ll get to those digital crafts in a moment, but you want to have more than one tool in the box. So, I recommend two diverse skills. Will Sullivan once called these “Peace Out” skills, because it makes it much easier to move from job to job as necessary, throwing up two fingers as you walk out the door.

Learn a Web craft

A long time ago in Web years, I wrote about a trinity of recommended Web skills for journalism students: multimedia, data, and community management. Learn any one, and you can get a job tomorrow.

That’s still pretty much true, but I’m encouraging you to pair that digital skill with an analog skill.

Great at video editing? Be great at photo editing for print, too.

Great at slinging XML into Flash maps? Be great at enterprise reporting, too.

Great at HTML/CSS? Be great at print page design, too.

Great at community management? Study up on media law so you can know when to cite Section 230 in the corporate lawyer’s office when the moment comes. (And it will.)

And vice versa.

Get the idea? Don’t be one-dimensional. You probably aren’t.

Previously

• On the first day of film school at NYU…
• Why train programmers as journalists?
• If you think online news is difficult…

I like to take it an order of magnitude up into the branches of the tree, along these lines: “The diaspora of information (having been set free by the Web, mostly) knows infinitely more than I do.”

So here are a few links to some of the latest advances in what I think of as the tools, techniques, and tricks to surfacing the valuable information out there in the diaspora.

How Yelp deals with everybody getting four stars (on average)
Published at venturebeat.com.
Star ratings on the Internet are ripe for some sort of psychological research, aren’t they? Merlin Mann spent a few days griping about this on Twitter recently. Check it out when you can.

StackOverflow Shares its Mojo: White Label Q&A for All
Published at ReadWriteStart on October 12, 2009.
Stack Overflow was a huge inspiration for ReportingOn. Now, for $129/month, your own Stack.
“Because the company allows users to rebrand the tool, override style sheets and insert HTML, forum owners can insert advertisements and generate their own revenue.”

Share Folders in Google Docs
Published at Google Operating System on October 12, 2009.
Seems useful for small/student newsrooms using Google Docs as their file management system, right?
“You can now share folders with your contacts and even make some of your folders public. If you allow anyone to view or edit a folder, Google generates a publicly accessible URL for a page that lists all the files from your folder.”

Google Wave And The Dawn Of Passive-Aggressive Communication
Published at TechCrunch on October 12, 2009.
MG Siegler looks at Google Wave and sees a blend of synchronous and asynchronous conversation, then cleverly tags it as ‘passive-aggressive.’
“Whether Google Wave succeeds is really irrelevant. More important is if the idea of Wave does. Again, the idea of passive-aggressive communication.”

A peek behind Technically Philly’s Knight Grant Application
Published at Wired Journalists on October 8, 2009.
A featured Wired Journalists post by Sean Blanda covering the backstory of Technically Philly’s Knight News Challenge grant.
“With the administrative burdens outsourced, the barrier for creating a sustainable news organization in the city is lowered dramatically.”

My aggregation experience: The Michigan government shutdown
Published at BrianManzullo.com on October 8, 2009.
How do you cover a midnight state government shutdown at a student newspaper? You link. And then you link some more. Brian Manzullo has the traffic to prove it works.
“Every update from here on out would be simply aggregation from the Detroit Free Press and other sources. I updated with the consequences of the shutdown, the latest developments, little details and, most importantly, more links.”

Readers expect news to find them
Published at Nieman Journalism Lab on October 7, 2009.
Of course we do. Gina Chen revisits “…if the news is that important, it will find me…”

Next Trends from ONA: Curation, Entrepreneurship, the Real-Time Web
Published at Poynter Institute on October 7, 2009.
Steve Myers lists the crucial takeaways from this year’s Online News Association conference, including this: “Curation is the new aggregation.”

The Rise Of SlideShare And How Corporate Presentations Became Entertainment
Published at SiliconBeat on October 6, 2009.
Chris O’Brien on SlideShare’s growth and why we watch: “Somehow, these presentations have left the dimly lit confines of conference rooms and trade shows to take their place as new forms of art and expression. Business has become entertainment.”

Knight Foundation to Fund Plug-and-Play Version of EveryBlock
Published at Poynter Institute on October 5, 2009.
Pat Thornton talks with Gary Kebbel about a possible future for EveryBlock’s open-sourced code: “The Knight Foundation is working with advisers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to form a team to further development of EveryBlock and make it much easier for news organizations to set up the software on their sites, Kebbel said. Knight will work with several news organizations around the country to install EveryBlock for them. Once this additional development is completed, the new code will be released.”

Most Commented Posts

• 10 obvious things about the future of newspapers you need to get through your head
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Well, I finished. Here’s the proof, which arrived in the mail a few days ago:

Previously

• Grad school update: I think I’m done
• Spartans, you rock my world
• Suzanne Yada recommends you grow a pair

I spent most of last Thursday through Sunday at the 2009 Online News Association conference in San Francisco, and if you follow me on Twitter or spotted a short post on my blog over the weekend, you know that Publish2, my current employer, was honored with a rather pleasant award on Saturday night at the Online Journalism Awards.

And earlier that day, I helped lead an unconference session on “Context and the Coming Link Economy,” which turned out to be one of my favorite conversations of the weekend, with help from Matt Thompson, Elaine Helm, Jay Rosen, and other journalists who turned out to talk through the ideas we had in mind.

Meanwhile, I caught a few excellent panels each day, including one about the Journalist as Entrepreneur moderated by Mark Briggs of Serra Media and Journalism 2.0.

Mark was one of many people I was excited about meeting for the first time in person at ONA, and we had a good time and a managed a solid conversation or two, but I think we both saw something had changed in the attitudes we saw from the journalists in the room, or at the very least, that there was something different about this conference.

He was using the word “swagger” to describe it. In this post, he outlines exactly what he means:

“Instead of simply feeling positive about the future, many people I talked to had confidence that their organization was on the right track. Even people who were looking for jobs didn’t seem to be scared.”

That’s a shift. A big shift.

The time of handwringing has past. Anyone still tearing their shirt over what comes next for the news business should take note: The news business is moving on. It’s time to get on the boat. Train’s leaving the station. Put up or shut up. Demos not memos. Your metaphor of choice, but the message is clear:

It’s time to get busy building a new ecosystem for news.

Some of us have a head start.

Hence, swagger.

Previously

• So who do we lock in the room with a whiteboard and a laptop…
• My advice to journalism students
• Publish2 Wins Gannett Foundation Award For Technical Innovation in the Service of Digital Journalism

Here’s our big thank you to all the journalists that made our success possible.

Previously

• ONA09 debrief and the swagger
• The avatar problem
• Publish2 acquires Wired Journalists

But they don’t know me.

I mean, they know what I say and write and produce online, but most of them know my avatar better.

That’s the one.  I’m sitting outside at a Cambridge, Massachusetts metro stop in December 2006 on a cold day during a break in an epic walk around Boston with my wife, wearing a (beloved, but now lost) hat she knit for me.

That’s the story of the avatar, but frankly, I’m considerably larger than a 73px by 73px image.

An example of the reactions the avatar problem leads to, from a much later date in Cambridge:

Of course, meeting in person largely solves the avatar problem.

Look for me at ONA. I’ll be the guy wearing the name tag that says “Ryan Sholin” on it.

Previously

• ONA09 debrief and the swagger
• Publish2 Wins Gannett Foundation Award For Technical Innovation in the Service of Digital Journalism
• October Carnival of Journalism: How to move the needle in your newsroom today

The Pitch

1. Open up a coworking space for the Web workers in your town.
2. Partner with a local nonprofit organization tasked with providing the community with job skills training.
3. Give the Web workers (your paying customers) a discount based on the number of classes or hours of one-on-one training they offer to the community.

If you live in a city with a vibrant community of Web workers, chances are you’ve heard of coworking. I’d hesitate to call it a movement exactly, but it’s a trend with a simple premise: Create a space for telecommuters and freelancers to do their thing in a collaborative office-like setting, where they can use whiteboards, conference rooms, and each other to sound out ideas and maybe have a cup of coffee or two along the way.  Users of this space pay a daily, weekly, monthly rate, using a variety of membership models, for benefits like a reserved spot, an assigned desk, or storage lockers.

So there you are with a posse of intelligent, hard-working, collaboration-minded Web workers doing their thing, having a good time, and generally feeling like the next big thing.

Now is the time to use that momentum for social good.

Open up your coworking space to the community.  Maybe you’re located in an urban area still behind on the revitalization curve.  Maybe you’re located in a university town with a serious digital divide issue.  Maybe you’re located in a suburb hit hard by the recession, with lots of unemployed folks looking around for their next career.

Open your doors to them, with at least two options for learning Web skills that could help them get their next job, a better job, or their first job:

• Classes taught by one or two coworkers at a time, like an introduction to Photoshop, HTML/CSS basics, or blogging.
• Office hours where coworkers with specific skills are available for one-on-one training for more advanced students.

Things you will need to make this work

• Web worker friends interested in coworking.
• A nonprofit organization as a partner.
• Patience.
• Funding: I mentioned the Knight Foundation earlier, but this doesn’t have to be about news.  There are millions of dollars flowing into communities and nonprofits from the federal government at the moment, and post-industrial job skills must be on the list of the sort of things that money should be paying to provide, right? Right.
• A very serious entrepreneurial spirit.
• A big smile.

I gave this idea some pretty serious thought a few months ago in Rochester, NY, before we moved to the DC area, and came to the conclusion that I wasn’t personally ready for the massive life-changing-ness that this sort of enterprise required … but maybe you are.

If you go for it, let me know.

Notes for news-oriented friends: Yes, your news organization could do something similar in a Newsroom Café setting, and at some point I thought this could be a way to train the community as citizen journalists to provide a context for learning Web worker job skills.  Maybe that would work.

Previously

• New at IdeaLab: The People Formerly Known as the Audience need a new name
• Are your readers a community?
• On IdeaLab: Reporter-turned-blogger covers the island of Alameda

Scott’s latest post on the topic argues that “content doesn’t matter without the package.”

“Newspapers’ inability to generate the same revenue online as in print has nothing to do with content. It’s because on the web they are no longer in the business of packaging content, and that’s what the newspaper business, like every other media business, has always been about. Instead, media companies put their content on the web and let search and other aggregators package it.”

It’s that last part that’s most interesting. I mean, it’s no surprise that the news business in the age of the Web now operates in a world of unbundled media, where the mp3 is currency, and the album is an outdated package. The individual news story, blog post, or tweet is not something we’re willing to pay for as consumers, even though we might occasionally still drop a few quarters in a box for a Sunday New York Times print edition — a packaged product that includes a bunch of individual items and products that we’re interested in. (For me, it’s just about the crossword, and it’s been multiple years since I last purchased said paper for said purpose.)

But.  How do we consume all those broken up pieces of content, news, information, and commentary online?

Maybe we use Google Reader. (A package of RSS feeds we’ve selected.)

Or Twitter. (A package of microblogging feeds we’ve selected.)

Once upon a time, people paid for software like RSS readers. (NetNewsWire in its heyday.)

Today, some people pay for Twitter clients like Tweetie, and many, many more pay for iPhone apps that package individual bits and streams of information into a pleasant interface that minimizes both button-pushing and waiting, two things of limited desirability when a human being is mobile.

The iPhone app package is so useful and valuable to us as consumers, that we’re even willing to pay for niche content like a Miami Dolphins app from a news organization.

Questions:

• What other repackaged interfaces for unbundled media will consumers be willing to pay for?
• How do you consume news and information? Do you navigate from site to site, or do you operate a packaged interface?
• Which companies, organizations, and individuals are winning at repackaging unbundled media?

Previously

• 5 important things that happened in the last 10 days
• I may never blog again…
• Carnival of Journalism: Are we asking the right questions about online revenue models?

“3. Hire human beings, not a programming language or Web framework. Unless you’re doing the programming yourself, stay focused on your end goal and steer clear of mandating how the humans you hire do the job. Don’t look over the designer’s shoulder and worry about which shade of eggshell white to paint the walls until you have something really great to hang on them. Like content, for instance.”

You are getting your Knight News Challenge application ready, right? The deadline is October 15. Get on it.

Previously

• Announcing: ReportingOn 2.0 is live
• Catch up or get left behind
• Highlights from four days with my head in a blender full of wildly intelligent people