Stevie Ray Vaughan memorial album to be released

"I grew up on the road ... the torture of touring is nothing new to me," she said.

Rare recordings released by Stevie's estate for Blues Museum of Chicago

OPEN THIS BOOK BEFORE YOU OPEN your browser — “Journalism 3.0” explains everything you need to know.  You could spend five years staring at a computer screen, Googling “journalism,” analyzing databases and doing library research, but why?  This book has done all of that for you — without data overage charges. 

"It isn't easy being me ..."

It encapsulates subjects ranging from traditional newsgathering and Associated Press style to mobile journalism, social media, HTML and XML coding, multimedia news storytelling and digital pagination — all with a historic perspective showing how the profession became what it is today.  “Journalism 3.0” also has links to an online library of books, articles, interactive exercises and videos that bring journalism visually alive. “Journalism 3.0” is not a hornbook or scholarly treatise.  It does not have footnotes like math or political science textbooks. For the most part, it reads more like a magazine article or a newspaper column than a textbook, and it is written in the Associated Press style followed by journalists worldwide. It offers no guidance for marketing or public relations, which merit their own textbooks, and does not predict the future of digital news media.  It is not a “survival guide” and excludes neither theory nor practice.  It does not emphasize technology while ignoring traditional journalistic practices, or vice versa.  It does not portend to be prophetic nor looks exclusively at the present, future or past. It contains no superfluous topics or a bunch of boring stuff that no one really wants to read. 
So why shell out good money for this book? Because it tells you everything you need to know and how to do it. Nothing more.  Nothing less. “Journalism 3.0” does not talk subjects to death; instead, it explains how to do what needs to be done to succeed.  Beyond that, it offers nothing that would waste your time. Steal this book if you must — I will not call the police. (I cannot speak for the publisher, however.)

This textbook is personal to me and this is why: Due to a decade of massive layoffs and forced retirements, a new generation of journalists is struggling to make a difference without the mentoring benefiting their predecessors. This void eviscerated the news judgment once forged between experienced journalists who mentored more inexperienced colleagues. Take a look at an excerpt from a May 5, 2016, New York Times Magazine story by David Samuels about Ben Rhodes, former White House deputy national security adviser.  It is a chilling wakeup call for veterans like me.  Rhodes admits members of the Obama administration lied to sell the Iran nuclear arms deal to the public and is shockingly blunt in describing to Samuels how he played the media to seal the deal:
“The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old,” Rhodes said, “and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns … They literally know nothing.”This is not the fault of the young Washington press corps. Print, broadcast and digital journalists today are more talented than any generation preceding them — but they were literally robbed of mentoring and one-on-one tutoring from more experienced journalists due to industry downsizing.
This is why I wrote “Journalism 3.0.”  I have decades of experience as both a journalist and college professor.  I am one of the nation’s first major-market digital news editors who balanced a 32-year career in daily journalism concurrently with a 25-year job as a college professor and media lawyer (I know, a real workaholic). I have published 7,500 local, state and national news stories read by millions worldwide, and I want to help fill the mentoring void left by industry downsizing.   The bottom line is that I want to pass on what I have learned during four decades as a professional journalist and academic before I die.  Why? Because without journalism, there can be no democracy, and this is just the plain truth. No journalism, no democracy.  No journalism, no justice. Without journalism, it is impossible to improve the human condition.
I believe in the new generation of journalists with all of my heart and soul. I want to arm students with the weapons they need to survive in the increasingly completive and dangerously manipulative world of journalism.  I know precisely what these weapons are, and I can clearly explain how to effectively wield them. If you want to be able to stick it where the sun does not shine on people like Rhodes, let me show you how.