Author: RC Lations

September’s Book Club Selection: Spreadable Media – Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture

Posted on by RC Lations

spreadable-media-book

We hope you'll join us for our next News Nerd Book Club hangout on Wednesday, September 14th at 1pm ET.

This month we'll be reading Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture by Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green.

From the book overview at NYU Press:

Spreadable Media maps fundamental changes taking place in our contemporary media environment, a space where corporations no longer tightly control media distribution and many of us are directly involved in the circulation of content. It contrasts “stickiness”—aggregating attention in centralized places—with “spreadability”—dispersing content widely through both formal and informal networks, some approved, many unauthorized. Stickiness has been the measure of success in the broadcast era (and has been carried over to the online world), but “spreadability” describes the ways content travels through social media.

Here's the event invitation and ZOOM video chat link if you'd like to join us.

Hope to see you on September 14th. Happy reading!

Document Everything: My First Week at INN

Posted on by RC Lations

One week on the books and I can’t believe it’s Friday already!

Allow me to introduce myself. I’m RC, the new Lead Developer here at INN. It’s hard to imagine that just a month ago I was meeting Adam through the WordPress community and starting to learn about INN. It was easy to get excited about the work we’re doing, and as a friend put it, “working on news stuff is, in my opinion, fantastically interesting”.

Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time diving into documentation. Much to the delight of this new guy, it seems like everything we do has documentation, from setting up my computer to what meetings we hold each week. I come from the agency world where the goal is to get something done as quickly as possible and move onto the next thing (Hint: we didn’t write much documentation). Now being on the receiving end of needing documentation and having it available to me, I’m quickly gaining an appreciation for its place in our work.

So far, INN is everything I had hoped it would be and more. It was easy to get a sense of what it would be like before I started, because everything was documented and available to me on Github. What isn’t documented is how great, and helpful, and friendly everyone who works here is. I’m so happy to be a part of the team and I can’t wait to dive into some code and see what we can build together.