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About this site...

For most visitors, this home page is here to anchor the links in the top right corner: My Radford page is for students looking for information about my courses or the blog items and bookmarks that pick up on (or foreshadow) what we do in class...

For fall 2008 I'm back using Boblog on Blogger's blogspot.com server, where I can add material more often than I do at my Other Journalism blog. I'm fighting the temptation to have another blog inside the new RU School of Communication website, which I had a hand in building in the summer of 2008, while also moving into a new office at 704 Fairfax St. (Apt. K). With all of that going on, two blogs are almost too much, but they weave into all of my courses. To simplify matters, the left column of Boblog now includes summary feeds from the "other" blog and from my latest Web bookmarks.

(Earlier in 2008, I was using Boblog for posts about the One Laptop Per Child project, where I volunteered some documentation while trying out OLPC's little green laptop, which I still think is very cool, even if I don't have more time to be involved.)

The right column is full of links to Web sites I use and recommend, including one that allows you to play my favorite old newspaper movie -- full length and for free -- just by clicking the picture at the right to open a new window, or by using the player at the bottom of the page. The rest of this left column has some biography and links to things I've written on the Web or on paper.

In August 2007 I added the Scottish tartan background on this page to celebrate moving to the "home of the Highlanders" -- not Scotland, but Radford University in Radford, Va., where I joined the Media Studies Department, which has since become part of a new School of Communication.

As much as I enjoyed spending three years in Knoxville, the new position offers more flexible teaching, research and tenure opportunities than my lecturership at UT, and the celtic coincidence was an extra selling point. "Bob" (or "Robby") is short for Robert Bruce, so my becoming a "Highlander" might have some Glasgow ancestors smiling. They even had the same name as a county next to Radford, the inspiration for using using one of the "Montgomery" clan tartans.

Besides, my mother's clan should like the background's Irish-friendly color. And my Polish relatives may be amused that the county across the river is named Pulaski. What's that song about "coming home to a place he'd never been before"? (Wrong song and mountains, but I'm getting the same feeling.)

Most frequently updated: Add a "dotcom" to Couranteer, an old word for "newspaper reporter," to take a shortcut to my weblog. I originally named it "Other Journalism," which still fits. It's mostly about changes in professional journalism, plus the rise of blogs and other online publishing tools anyone can use. The latest wrinkle involves bloggers and news organizations exploring "pro-am" cooperation.

(My blog's old, long address still works, too -- "radio dot weblogs dot com..." followed by a seven-digit number that even I can't remember.) An old friend interviewed me about blogging in 2006.

Blogging tools: I've tried most of them and keep demos around.  Userland Radio is what I use for my main blog, with Blogger as a backup, Drupal at KnoxViews, and WordPress at both Blogsome and  Harvard's Berkman Center, which used to employ Userland's Manila blog server and content-manager software.

Lots of links: My blogs and the right column of this page have long been ways to share links to interesting sites. My del.icio.us bookmarks do that in an even bigger way, with more than 1,000 links tagged with dozens of keywords for information categories you can combine.  For instance, use http://del.icio.us/bstepno/django to see my links related to the site-construction framework by that name, or make that django+Holovaty for links related to a particular Django co-author. 

Community site: Currently up for adoption: A site I started for my 2004-2007 Knoxville neighborhood: Maplehurst.org

About me and this home page...

I started writing with and about computers when The Hartford Courant put one of its first Atex editing terminals on my desk some 25 years ago. A job with a software company inspired my 1988 master's thesis about hypertext, which had me alert to that word when it spread across the Internet a few years later. I have been publishing on the Web since 1994 in one form or another.

My beat was "higher education" for most of my newspaper career, and I have been in and out of my own higher education ever since: Three times as a grad student (of culture + computers + communication), then as a teacher at UNC Chapel Hill (summer 1998), Emerson College in Boston (1999-2003), the University of Tennessee in Knoxville (2004-2007), and now at Radford.

This "stepno.com" domain and home page aren't just an ego trip, but look more like one in the summertime. During the school year, a link on top takes students to course material at Radford. (My previous academic creations are or will be archived at stepno.com/unc, stepno.com/ec and stepno.com/ut) The rest of this page makes a handy parking space for past, present and future projects, personal news, and a right column full of links I use myself and recommend to others, as well as a few mild-mannered amusements. As the banner suggests, you can reach me by e-mail as

If you're another Stepno, or looking for one, (If you thought the "stepno" address was short for "step number," in either a computer-coding or 12-step sense, you're in the wrong place -- but feel free to look around.)

My main Web spaces:

• My Other Journalism Weblog is for thoughts, notes and headlines about news reporting, personal and community journalism on the Web. I sometimes include "class notes" for my writing or online journalism students, demos of technical tricks, and (less often) photos and news of personal events. The blog's left column has links to essay-style pages that I update from time to time, usually to preserve link that might get lost in the calendar-accessed daily blog entries. The blog's "other" name started when I had several "demo" blogs, but I kept this as the main one. Blogging itself can be an "other journalism," so the name stayed.


• I've sorted out my newspaper-related blog items as a subset to link with the website I manage for a journalism educators' group, the AEJMC Newspaper Division. I've also saved my notes from my Digital Archives panel at the AEJMC 2006 national convention in San Francisco.


• In 2003 I started listening to audio weblog "podcasts" and in 2004 I started thinking about having one of my own. I decided to make it a "hobby" site about folk music, rather than pretend to be in the news business. I named it "podfolk." The testing was a success, but I decided not to try regular podcasts while school is in session. For now, it's an infrequent text-only blog about music, and a place to hang some of my photos of musicians.


• My Red Liner Weblog takes its name from the site's Harvard-crimson motif and the MBTA subway I used to take to get to Harvard's Berkman Center for the Internet & Society for Thursday night blogger meetings. (See the disclaimer in the blog's right margin.) Originally, "Red Liner" was a combination of notes on issues that came up at Berkman meetings and an excuse to learn to use the Manila community blogging system. Now it survives mostly for classroom demonstrations and situations when I can't post to my usual blog. (The same is true of my even older Blogger demo site.)


• About Weblogs, my original year-2000 discussion page about the subject, survives, with many updates, as a sidebar to my main weblog. Newer pages there explain RSS Syndication, podcasting and video blogging.


• AEJMC Newspaper is the home page I update now and then for the newspaper division of the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication, along with the newspaper-related weblog items I mentioned above.


• My old "Resources for Reporters" collection of more than 1,200 Web bookmarks, originally a bookmark list for my students, then an obsession, has been merged with the New England SPJ Resources database, including state-by-state sections and an annotated list of lists.
  
  
• My University of Tennessee Knoxville pages for news writing and online journalism classes.
  

• My Emerson College faculty archive of pages created for courses in the Department of Journalism and the Institute for Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson. Here are samples of student work in my online journalism classes.


• My grad school archive of pages built at the University of North Carolina School of Journalism & Mass Communication, 1994-1999.

Old News: After four years of teaching in "all but the dissertation" limbo, I officially became "Dr. Bob" on Dec. 21, 2003, the day of winter graduation at the University of North Carolina School of Journalism & Mass Communication in Chapel Hill. More "who am I?" biographical information is at the top of my earlier home page. My old freelance/consulting resume may be of interest to a few people.

More of my writing

• An MIT conference paper based on a dissertation chapter about the visual evolution of WRAL OnLine.
• A rediscovered ASCII copy of my 1988 Wesleyan University MALS master's project, "Approaching hypertext: Cognitive models and usability of an electronic book technology."
• My oldest online "writing sample," a Hartford Courant feature story that was revived along with the New England Fiddle Contest. Contest organizers had both the story and a photo of mine in a press kit in 1980 -- and put them online 20 years later.
• For a journalism history conference, I started digging into The Evening Graphic of the Roaring Twenties, and I'm still researching its themes of visual literacy, newsroom cultures, evolving ethics, and blurred lines between news and entertainment.
• Computers also blur lines between "real" and "virtual" communities. Those communities don't have to be as computer-oriented as engineers or bloggers. For example, I've written about online yacht clubs (for Soundings) and I've sung along with computer-assisted folksingers.
• More stories, scattered across the past 30 years -- from PC World, Soundings, The Boston Globe, The Hartford Courant and its Sunday magazine. (Note: For a couple of those, you'll have to imagine the yellowing newsprint of the originals.)

Nuts and bolts: This page and those linked to it were created with a variety of computers and software, including (new in December 2007) a cute little green laptop.org One Laptop Per Child machine in Linux terminal mode, as well as Macs and PCs with BBEdit, Nvu, Notetab,  Dreamweaver, Arachnophilia, Emacs, SSH, Pico and Userland Radio.

Thanks to my friend Richard Silverman, former occupant of what we informally call "The Robert S. Stepno Chair in Mathematics" at Wesleyan University, for hosting this page and helping me learn to be a little more of a geek... (I wonder if my Dad's big brown chair is still in some math grad student's office?) And what's all this nonsense about typing "chainsaw murderer" into "Google" and clicking "I'm feeling lucky?"

• Google.com usually finds whatever I'm looking for online, but I also visit Amazon's A9.com and other search engines. Know your sources: Whois can help identify owners of Web domains, while Who Owns What? identifies owners of mass media companies. The Center for Public Integrity lets you search for television, radio, cable, broadband and newspaper companies within ZIP code areas. Here's Radford
• I use del.icio.us to make my bookmark list searchable using overlapping categories and keywords, but rarely have time to go back and delete dead links. Combine keywords with a slash and a plus sign, like this: del.icio.us/bstepno/radford+technology
• Archive.org is a great place to find old Web pages, copyright-free music, and even classic films like "His Girl Friday" (left), my favorite newspaper movie.
• Wikipedia offers anyone the opportunity to inform or misinform you, and you can do the same for them. Go to any page on a topic you know something about, then check its "history" and "discussion" tabs to see how the "facts" have changed.
• Craigslist is almost everywhere, including Southwest Virginia, where Radford ads appear in both the Blacksburg and Roanoke sections.

news biz buzz

• J-blogs: My own green and red weblogs make no attempt to keep up with Jim Romenesko's daily newsbiz news or ONA's Cyberjournalist. EditorsWeblog has an international news business focus; the Lost Remote knows what's going on with television news online, and Editor & Publisher still keeps track of the newspaper industry, including its online incarnation. Paid Content, Smartmobs and J.D. Lasica's Social Media add online media perspectives.
• Media watchdogs and support organizations: Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, the Project for Excellence in Journalism, Investigative Reporters and Editors, the Center for Public Integrity, the Media Giraffe Project, and tthe Society of Professional Journalists.
• And more: The Poynter Institute, PR Watch, the American Society of Journalists & Authors, the National Association of Science Writers, the Reporters Committee on Freedom of the Press.
• Before the Web, we had to look for insider journalism news at the "JRs" -- American, Columbia -- to which you can add the Online Journalism Review: AJR, CJR and OJR.

Virginia news

• I started to explore my new home in the summer of 2007, using Virginia news and Radford area news, via Topix... and...
• The Tartan, Radford student newspaper.
• RU Whim student magazine online.
• New River Voice
• New River Valley News
• WVRU
• Roanoke Times
• BlueRidge Muse, a topnotch "citizen journalist" weblog in Floyd.
• Washington Post Virginia politics page
• InRich from the Richmond Times-Dispatch
• ... and more to come.

old news friends

• My "own" news media: The Hartford Courant, Soundings, the Raleigh News & Observer, where my Web-editing adventures began at  Nando.net, and WRAL OnLine, where I did my dissertation research. 
• In Boston my news bookmarks were Boston.com, the Boston Herald, Boston Phoenix, Community Newspapers, the Weekly Dig for an "alternative" edge,  Adam Gaffin's Boston Online for local lore and news.
• In Knoxville, my "visit daily" news links were KnoxNews, The Daily Beacon, tnjn.com (which I had a small hand in starting), the Metro Pulse, WUOT-FM (NPR), WBIR TV, WATE TV, WVLT TV, plus KnoxViews  and the KnoxBlab.

blogs and feeds

• 
• While living in the Boston area, I was an early member of the Thursday night circle of bloggers that Dave Winer started at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center, a great introduction to blogs as more than personal online diaries or favorite-links lists. 
• A blogger formerly known as South Knox Bubba helped me find my way to Knoxville, where he had assembled a whole Rocky Top Brigade of Tennessee bloggers. (That last link once led to an impressive array of blog feed-aggregator lists by topic and region, but it was on hiatus the last time I looked. Earlier, I archived the 2005 Rocky Top Brigade membership list, which is still there, along with the group's original constitution, which is wonderful, single malt and all.
• "Daily Me" style feed aggregator services are now part of everything from Bloglines and Netvines, or my.Yahoo and i.Google, to most Web browsers. One of the first I used is still there, a batch of shortcuts to news about technology, Ireland, journalism and other topics I subscribed to in Moreover newsfeeds on my Poynter profile page.
• For more about the history of  blogs, RSS, podcasts, aggregators and more aggregators, follow the links in the left column of my weblog.

headline news

• For comparison when a big story breaks, see the international collection of headlines at news.google.com. (It's an automated search, so expect some idiosyncrasies.)
• Slashdot and CNet, both good for a technical perspective on the news. For information about information, I visit Resource Shelf, among other places that I may get around to listing here.
• The Christian Science Monitor has thoughtful coverage of world and national issues.
• For more world and national news, I check the BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, Reuters, The Irish Times, and The Yomiuri Shimbun (in English). Also, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, AR, PRI, PBS, ABC News.
• The Associated Press Web pages, for today's news, enter through the Cape Cod Times or Mass Live.

magazines and other pastimes

• For more information, The Atlantic recognizes that an ocean, a good magazine and a good website have depth in common. Online, the magazine's searchable archives go back to the days when hypertext was just a glimmer in Vannevar Bush's eye.
• Other magazines in my life: Wired, Editor & Publisher, Mother Jones, Harpers, Adbusters, Dirty Linen, Sing Out!, Folio, InfoWorld, MacWorld, PC World and Soundings.
• Life is also music: The Mudcat Cafe, an amazing archive and conversation about of traditional and not-so-traditional songs. Live music: LEAF, near Asheville, N.C., is one of the best music and dance festivals I've been to -- so good that they have fall and spring editions. Other past haunts: In Connecticut, The Sounding Board and the Jovial Crew at the Griswold Inn. In the Boston area, The Burren, Club Passim, Johnny D's and Ryles. In Knoxville, the Bijou, WDVX Blueplate Specials, the Laurel Theatre,  the Tennessee Theatre and the Timewarp Tea Room. 

For many more links, some of them out of date by now, see my old Bob @ UT,  Bob @ Emerson and Bob @ UNC Web pages and  my increasingly obsessive del.icio.us/bstepno bookmarks.

Journalism at the Movies

Meanwhile, you can do more than read about films online: Archive.org has started allowing other Web publishers to "embed" video players in our pages, so here's "His Girl Friday." Grab some popcorn and click on the dark screen to start the Hollywood-plus-Web magic.

photo by R.S. Stepno

That's probably a Sunday Boston paper or Springfield Union. The past week's Daily Hampshire Gazettes are stacked on the radiator. (My father took the photo.) I started delivering the Gazette in junior high school and still remember columns by Arthur Hoppe making me laugh--the first byline that ever stuck with me. When today's 12-year-olds are turning gray and entering their anec-dotage, will they remember the first Web page, blog or podcast they subscribed to?