By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions

Reconnecting with your audience

I’ll be leading a discussion on “Blogging, Social Media and Journalism” tomorrow from 10:45 a.m. to noon at the annual convention of the New England Newspaper & Press Association at the Park Plaza. I’ve put together some slides (above), but I’m conceiving this session as an unconference, and I want to turn it over to the editors and reporters who’ll be attending as quickly as possible.

The blabbing continues. From 3:45 to 5 p.m., Adam Gaffin of Universal Hub and I will lead a workshop on “Writing for the Web.”

Finally, on Saturday from 1:45 to 3:15 p.m., I’ll be taking part in a panel discussion on social media that’s part of the ACLU of Massachusetts “Secrecy, Surveillance and Sunlight” conference at UMass Boston. I’ll be joined by Northeastern University Law School professor Hope Lewis, ACLUM online communications coordinator Danielle Riendeau and ACLUM communications director Christopher Ott.

Now, to get back to those slides (and sorry for the funny line breaks; there’s something about SlideShare that I’m obviously missing). There are a number of examples I’ll be talking about that are worth taking a deeper look at. So I thought I’d post some links here.

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11 Comments

  1. Wow, impressed to have made the presentation. Good luck Dan!

  2. LFNeilson

    Say hello to George Speers’ ghost for me. Just look for a cloud of yellow chalk dust. I do miss that convention.

  3. Hey Dan!
    Excited that you’ll be talking about SeeClickFix.

  4. O-FISH-L

    Off topic, but with over two feet on the ground outside of the White House, it could be time for the next installment of “global warming”, ha!

    • Dan Kennedy

      @Fish: I think I’ve got three more installments to go. Maybe I’ll pick up on this excellent story from the Boston Globe on the changing ecology of Walden Pond, thanks to the climate change-driven invasion of plants from the south.

      Jeff jacoby is very excited about this Washington Post piece that examines why liberals are so condescending.

      One possible explanation might be that it’s damn hard not to be when right-wingers point to a snowstorm as evidence that global warming isn’t real.

  5. local editor

    Didn’t we have quite a warm spell a few weeks back? Isn’t that proof global warming is real?
    (Of course not, but the fact that it gets cold in winter isn’t proof that global warming is a hoax)

    But we digress, how did the social media “unconference” go?

    • Dan Kennedy

      @local editor: The social-media session went exactly how I hoped — a great audience that took over a half-hour into it. So it really did prove to be an unconference.

  6. Dunque

    Perhaps it’s more convincing that man-caused climate change is a fraud when the dire consequences predicted…melting Himalayan glaciers, disappearing rainforests…prove to be completely unsubstantiated. And, as predicted previously, was all about the money, specifically research money being steered to Dr. Pachauri’s TERI Institute.

    Does pointing that out help?

    Or how about the fact that record numbers of manatees died in Florida this year from…the cold?

    Condescend away!

    • Dan Kennedy

      @Dunque: Oh, I will continue to condescend when presented with silliness like your comment. Your claim that the Himalayan glaciers are not melting is false. You are confusing a problem over predictions that the glaciers would disappear entirely with the dramatic melting that has taken place over the past 50 years. Here are some photos, along with some data. Among other things, the average temperature in Nepal has risen by 1.5 degrees Celsius since 1975.

      As for the rainforests, I’ve seen predictions that global warming will help or harm them — irrelevant to the question of whether climate change is real.

      But … but … it’s snowing in Washington!

  7. Dunque

    No comment on the manatee issue. Translation – it doesn’t fit Dan’s already hardened opinion. Best to ignore.

    And let’s ignore this too “…the scandal which has forced the IPCC’s top officials, led by Dr Pachauri, to disown a claim originating from an Indian glaciologist, Dr Syed Husnain, that the Himalayan glaciers could vanish by 2035. What has made this reckless claim in the IPCC’s 2007 report even more embarrassing was the fact that Dr Husnain, as we revealed, was then employed by Dr Pachauri’s own Delhi-based Energy and Resources Institute (Teri). His baseless scaremongering about the Himalayas helped to win Teri a share in two lucrative research contracts, one funded by the EU.”

    Since you can’t contradict it, Dan, best to ignore it.

    The other claim is fascinating. “The scientific treatise summarizing the whole premise is based is proven to be wildly faulty (to put it mildly) but I have some pictures anyway.”

    And an isolated temperature reading. Which is beautiful in and of itself since it’s been shown that a large number of temperature reporting stations have been systematically dropped over the years from these studies, rendering comparison between earlier sets of data and current sets menaingless.

    Dan, doesn’t take too much work to look this up re: the Amazon either. But I’ll do it for you, since you don’t appear inclined. “…The IPCC made a prominent claim in its 2007 report, again citing the WWF as its authority, that climate change could endanger “up to 40 per cent” of the Amazon rainforest – as iconic to warmists as those Himalayan glaciers and polar bears. This WWF report, it turned out, was co-authored by Andy Rowell, an anti-smoking and food safety campaigner who has worked for WWF and Greenpeace, and contributed pieces to Britain’s two most committed environmentalist newspapers. Rowell and his co-author claimed their findings were based on an article in Nature. But the focus of that piece, it emerges, was not global warming at all but the effects of logging.”

    At a certain point you cross the line from condescension into obtuseness. You’re ignoring evidence like you are trying out for the LAPD.

    • Dan Kennedy

      @Dunque: It was cold in Florida this year. We all know that. If you think that is meaningful with respect to long-term climate change, then I can’t help you. We already know you think infighting among scientists is more significant than real-world documentation of the effects of global warming.

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