Fire-Wired Blog

I have a distinct memory from my junior year at Iowa State where my adviser asked "What are your workplace goals?" It wasn't a question I had ever been asked and certainly not something 21-year-old Pat had every considered. Everyone's been asked about their dream job or their career goals, but I had never heard the specific phrase of "workplace goals." Being someone who likes to reflect on interesting and unexpected encounters it took me a bit to come up with my dream workplace criteria. See workplace doesn't mean employer. I could fire off a list of dream employers in a heartbeat, but that wasn't the question. Second, goal isn't the same thing as dream. Goals are things you work towards and achieve, dreams are things that magically happen, e.g. lucky happenstance. There's also the possibility of dreams turning into nightmares, whereas goals are personally crafted and continually rewarding. After a minute of thinking out-loud about wha...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Why is the Internet full of lists? Headlines with numbers in them? Pictures filling out social network feeds? And what is with all the random bolded text on the Internet? The answer to all of the above is your brain and eyes. Our eyeballs are naturally attracted to pictures over text, bulleted lists over four-sentence paragraphs, headings that promise exact values over ambiguity and areas of importance in text over uniform print. Remember in school textbooks how pages broke information into color-coded sections with diagrams and bolded keywords? That is exactly what the Internet has become. Buzzfeed is huge because it has mastered all these techniques. At any point on Buzzfeed’s front page, a good deal of the headlines have numbers in them, promising listed information for easy consumption. Lists are akin to information junk food easy to consume and process for quick consumption. Altogether these concepts form the id...

15 months ago I left the journalism world, this was a really hard decision. Growing up I routinely watched the nightly news while my mom prepared dinner. I quickly fell in love with the storytelling aspect of a journalists life and the fact they were reporting on something different practically every day. So following my dream to be a rockstar, my life's ambition was to be a reporter.  In route to that dream I carried a videocamera with me practically everyday, worked for a few news radio stations, PA'd at local CBS is San Francisco and eventually became a small town reporter and T.V. Producer. So why did I drop the dream? Two reasons: my mortgage and the hope to one day provide sole support to family, so my wife can be a stay-at-home mom (her dream). While I may be out of the journalism game at the moment, there is a simple way to keep the dream alive; freelancing. Back in February, I applied to the local alternative newspaper, Cityview , for a freelance tech col...

It's time for my coworkers to sink or swim. The next two Fridays I won't be in the office to upload and form everyone's work so it's time to see who among them has been paying attention. This past February I install Joomla 1.5 on our webspace to manage our website. It's an outdated software but sadly we're locked into the space we use (bureaucracy...) so we can't use Wordpress. Joomla provides a CMS that almost anyone can pick up and contribute to. The problem is... some people don't want to play ball. Last month I attended the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas and heard a lot of speakers talk about multi-platform data delivery. The world of news has been segmented forever into Radio, Print, and TV. Well thanks to the omnipresence of social media they're all colliding and if you don't like it, basically you don't want to be a journalist.  Every GM, reporter, documentary producer, and journalism at NAB said the s...