I saw a great presentation by Brent Payne, SEO czar at the Chicago Tribune. Payne’s job is to make relevant all of the Trib’s online content; not editorially, but with keywords. 25 years ago, Fletch said it was all about ball bearings. Today, it’s all about search engine optimization. Not an easy task, considering there are 2,000 searches on Google per second.

If you haven’t read it, great post from Robert Niles on the Online Journalism Review re grad schools. Undergrad is mandatory, grad school is optional. The mentality students must take is more one of ROI–how much return will I be receiving from my time and dollars? I’m enrolled in the j-school grad program at DePaul University in Chicago. My classmates all come divergent backgrounds, which is reflective of the city itself. We all had our own reasons for coming in. We all have differing goals when we get out. I …

I’m a reader of sports satire site Deadspin, have been for years. If you are a consumer of sports news, it is a must read if not on a daily basis, certainly weekly. Sports is not politics, it’s protagonists should not be covered with the same seriousness as those on health care reform. Deadspin gets this, which is refreshing. Wil Leitch, the founder of the site, was the subject of a now-famous dressing down by writer Buzz Bissinger on a Bob Costas HBO special in 2008. Are bloggers real journalists? I don’t want to be the catalyst for that debate. Instead, I’d rather steer towards a even murkier subject–social responsibility vs monetization.

I’ve learned not to expect much from professional athletes. Having spent 8 years covering them on a daily basis, I’ve been much happier watching them from a fan’s perspective, mostly from Aisle 231, Row 4 at Wrigley Field. Enjoy them inside the arena, don’t hold them to any standard outside.
But Twitter has changed that. Now, I expect much more from my jocks, at least those that tweet. For those that have not embraced this social media platform, call your agent, get registered, and read the rest of this post. For …

So how do you make money as a journalist when no one is hiring? It’s a question that no one knows the answer to yet it’s a question we all need to know the answer to.
It was a question posed to Jason Fried, founder of 37signals, a software development company based in Chicago. I saw Fried speak last week and this guy is a true entrepreneur at heart. Case in point–as a kid, he would buy toy weapons from a catalog and then sell them to his friends at a …