From Chat Apps to Town Halls: Why More Newsrooms are Designing Journalism for Conversation

A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.” — Arthur Miller

At a panel on “The Hunt for News Products of the Future” hosted by CUNY and the New School last week, Aron Pilhofer, the Interim Chief Digital Officer of The Guardian, said he is fascinated with the intersection of messaging, bots and artificial intelligence in apps like Facebook’s project M, and how that might change how we enter into a conversation with the news. The comment came on the heels of Pilhofer discussing the new mobile app from Quartz, which uses a messaging interface to deliver news via interactions with the user. He said using the Quartz app was “the first time I opened up a news app and felt like it had a soul.”

I felt that too — perhaps not a soul, but a sense of connection.

Continue reading “From Chat Apps to Town Halls: Why More Newsrooms are Designing Journalism for Conversation”

I Have To Push My Own Limits To Let My Kids Find Theirs

“Parenting is full of negotiations and contradictions. For me, no tension is greater than that between wanting to develop a spirit of wild adventure and self-reliance in my kids and the deep yearning to keep them safe.”

Check out my new article at BuzzFeed Parents about risky play and keeping our kids safe (maybe too safe!?!). 

The article has sparked a lot of good debate about the limits we should put on ourselves and our children – I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Sometimes we have to push our own limits to let our kids find theirs.