It's been two years since Demo Day for my class of Tow-Knight Fellows at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. My pitch then: A data news service for hyperlocal digital news sites and weekly papers. I landed no sales in the summer following that semester of study in entrepreneurial journalism. In the fall I rejoined Gannett, this time at its Asbury Park Design Studio. So was I out of the entrepreneurial game? Not entirely, even if I hadn't cracked the starting lineup. During the Tow-Knight semester, I heard from a former newsroom colleague who is now with a small financial publishing house. The publisher had lost a key staffer who was expert in writing code, and my colleague thought I could help fill the gap. We never quite made the right connection that spring. But more than a year later, I again approached the publisher, offering to solve work flow problems on a freelance basis. Yes, they had just such a task, and over a few months I was able to streamline the shop's print-to-web process for filing prospectus content to the SEC's Edgar system. Before our collaboration, an experienced staffer had needed to open each prospectus in a commercial Windows program, resave in a particular way, do some minor editing and save again. Now, a script converts a folder of documents at once and adds the editing tweaks. The resulting software mostly uses Python, but the innermost layer is in a niche language that I learned for the occasion. So this was entrepreneurial, in that I pitched my wares and eventually pocketed a check. But it was not the public-service project I had pitched at CUNY. And I did not think of it as data journalism -- until I was about to wrap things up. The finished product was to be delivered on a flash drive, so I went shopping for a fresh one. The store clerk asked me if I wanted a drive capable of encryption. No need, I was able to tell him, this is turning something into a public record. So yes, data journalism of a sort. Happy for the chance to chip in.

End of the semester for Tow-Knight class of 2015

Nothing like an execution to concentrate the mind. Two public presentations, while nerve-wracking, have helped bring more definition to my project. The first was a four-minute slot in Professor Jeff Jarvis' classroom. We'd already gotten his feedback on our elevator pitches, delivered from our seats, and this was a little more of a spotlight from in front of the class. We were to consider this a pitch to investors, clients or partners. Soon after stepping up, I froze long enough to leave some dead air. Twice. But my audience was wonderfully patient. Early in the talk, I tried to establish that the imagined crowd consisted entirely of small-market publishers and editors. This helped me to be more concrete, I think. Talking about someone else's problem, it seems, involves less direct language than talking about your problem, and what we can do about it. Pretend publishers aside, I think the nuts-and-bolts approach -- complete with price numbers -- helped the real audience. One classmate told me the pitch was the first time she really got the picture of what I was offering. If I confused things for other classmates, they were too polite to say. Next up, a few days later, was a 30-second presentation before the social journalism class and other members of the CUNY community. A little scarier, and too short to set up the pretend-publisher scenario. It's not hard to roughly translate a word count to column inches or seconds of radio time. But I wanted this to live in my ear. And I wanted to do some editing on the bus. Enter Siri, sort of. I typed up my first draft, donned earbuds and asked TextEdit to Start Speaking while I ran the stopwatch app in another window. Snip. Speak. Repeat. After 40 miles of iteration, I probably had the pitch memorized. But I printed it out in geezer type and brought it to Room 308. As I listened to my classmates, I concluded that some of my language wasn't quite natural. So I made a few edits by hand, hewing to an even exchange of syllables. Then the mic was handed my way. 30, 29, 28 … 3, 2, 1. Exhale. For the Q&A that followed, I was almost relaxed, and I think the Q&A probably told more about the project than the allotted pitch. Good questions.

Dropbox. Slack. Trello. Tumblr. Evernote. GoogleDrive. Leanstack. Personapp. So many apps, and so many want to be the one, one, one that can make me more productive, sometimes by taking over data from my existing apps. For years, I have been stewing that many newsroom staffers, proudly and professionally curious, exhibit little curiousity about the software that sends their work out into the world. Now I have software fatigue. Not for writing software -- I've been gaining energy there -- but for using off-the-shelf software that others have recommended. Even hosting service Lunarpages, an old standby to me, has gotten into the act. I don't sign on often, but when I need it, I need it. In the midst of an in-class sprint, I found myself locked out. After stomping out of class, I called Lunarpages, and finally teased out of them that a periodic password change was in order, although the lock-out message pointed to something different. But the big log-in lockout of 2015 has been Slack. During January's snow day, our breakout team used Slack to communicate and pull together the Snowpocalypse site. Worked like a charm. Then the class at large adopted it. Trying to log into the new group, I got an error message was my email address was not on file. The adress was indeed on file. A help ticket from Slack, days of email traffic and some intervention from a Slack staffer later, I was able to use Slack in the EJCUNY15 group. Until Hack Jersey, when got a different, but equally false, error message when joining a group created at the hackathon. It will be interesting to see what happens with Slack the startup. It's getting a lot of buzz, along with VC cash. And I read that the New York Times is using it. I can't be the only one running into glitches; even within the class, Chad has misgivings about it. Surely the large Times staff has a Chad or a me in it. Maybe that means bugs will be treated as bugs, and they'll be fixed. Maybe it will fade out. I had not heard until this week that Slack was inspired by ICQ messaging. If it's supposed to be ICQ with a human face, perhaps there is some sign-on/sign-up protocol that's intuitively obvious to the ICQ club. It could confound my procedural senses but carry no baggage for rank newcomers. In a few days, I will be part of the Newsroom of the Past at my paper. But I am feeling much more like the software house of the past. Back then, a bug was a bug, a misleading error message was a bug, and we attacked the bugs before we shipped. In the era of the MVP, it's get it out there and let the customers sort it out. Sigh. Call it the funhouse-mirror effect, but there is a more painful note to the Slack experience. Every so often, my Mac will alert me to software updates. When I click on "Details," there are usually two entries, one for the Mac OS and another for Slack. The OS update description is pretty dry, but the one for Slack is all breezy and full of atty-tood. I can remember trying to inject some life into my own documentation with that kind of language. Now that I am looking for a particular bug fix, the cheeky language about everything but has been downright infuriating. So to my readers from 10 or 15 years ago, a profound, embarrassed and belated apology.

It was not scheduled as part of orientation, but CUNY's snow day on Jan. 27 turned into a team-building opportunity for the Entrepreneurial Journalism group. Before we dispersed on Jan. 26, we had broken into groups to come up with different takes on covering the impending snowstorm, being called Juno. In my group, we settled on a plan to map and aggregate content from authorities and other Rebecca established a Slack group that Philip and I could join and she arranged for our page to be hosted on squarespace. The top of the page was a map with interactivity plugged in from ThingLink, a tool we'd been introduced to the day before. Best part was that we connected with the wider group by marking their locations as map pins and asking for photos from those parts of town.