Matt Neznanski's Page

So amid plenty of news about newspaper woes (I'm not bothering to link anything--news of this is ubiquitous), I see this tutorial about how to make a broadsheet paper easier to read on the bus. It doesn't take much to draw some sort of connection: why make it hard to read the paper on the train, bus, whatever. Why make readers hack the paper? Besides, they're not the only ones who dislike broadsheet. My fa… Continue

Amid rising water, sandbags and calls to evacuate, the staff at the Cedar Rapids Gazette did a heroic job of bringing readers a stream of breaking news and multimedia in early June powered by generators and with floodwaters just a few feet away. Most impressive was the degree to which the paper responded to the call, answering readers' needs and their feedback on the fly and with a brand new editor at the helm. Reader resources continue in the paper's… Continue

Shame on me for reading it first somewhere else, but my eyes were glued to Web coverage of Iowa flooding by the Cedar Rapids Gazette. My friend Jason Kristufek heads up the paper's Web efforts, and he's been doing them proud. From a map-enabled display of stories as they were breaking (sorry, no link) early on and wall-to-wall coverage during the event to reader-drive… Continue

Thanks to a recent conversation with a local economic development expert and programmer/web guru, I finally have a two line explanation of Web 2.0:

• User-centric
• Open data

Obviously, there's a bunch to unpack there, which gives an aspiring new media strategist some hope for a prosperous future of innovation. Friday, mediabistro… Continue

Aaron Swartz piles on the praise for a This American Life show focused on the U.S. housing market meltdown. Swartz starts off by drawing lessons to fix the news: declining… Continue